Captain Wiggins

By the time of Joseph Wiggins, European mariners with a bent for exploration were running out of seas. Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan and Captain Cook had greatly advanced Europeans’ understanding of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. Only the Arctic and the Antarctic seemed to be left. The voyages of Sir John Franklin in the first half of the nineteenth century (and the attempts to establish what had happened to him after his disappearance in 1845) illustrated Britain's enthusiasm for penetrating the Arctic by sailing northwest. Wiggins revived the idea of addressing the Arctic by sailing northeast.

Born in Norwich in the English county of Norfolk, Wiggins was apprenticed to a ship-owning uncle in northeast England at the age of fourteen and sailed all over the world before taking the post of ‘Examiner in Navigation and Seamanship for the Port of Sunderland’ at the end of the 1860s (Johnson, Reference Johnson1907, pp. 1–6, 10–11; Josephson, Reference Josephson2014, pp. 25, 27; Stone, Reference Stone1994). Within a few years, he felt the need to go to sea again (Johnson, Reference Johnson1907, p. 15). He may have conceived the idea of exploring unfamiliar waters much earlier, for Sir Robert Morier, Britain's Ambassador to St Petersburg, said of him in a despatch to the Prime Minister of 1888 that, as ‘a young English mate on board a brig connected with the Archangel trade’ he had been taken by the notion that the Kara Sea derived its name from the Turkic word for black. According to Morier, Wiggins ‘inferred that such a name could never have been given to an ice-bound sea, and that therefore the Kara Sea implied open water. The dream of being the man who should open up this waterway never left him’ (The Times, 20 August 1888, p. 13; Stone, Reference Stone1995). In fact, the term ‘Kara’ when applied to the waters east of Novaia Zemlia probably just meant ‘northern’, in keeping with the Turkic practice, derived from China, of identifying points of the compass with colours (Findley, Reference Findley2005, p. 39; King, Reference King2004, p. xii; Trepavlov, Reference Trepavlov2007, p. 24), but this information seems not to have crossed Wiggins's path. It is also unclear how much he knew about the debates in which academics and sailors had been engaging for decades about the navigability of the Kara Sea (Tammiksaar & Stone, Reference Tammiksaar and Stone1997), but in view of the fact that examples can certainly be found of ships laden with goods from his home port of Sunderland getting customs clearance at Arkhangelsk (Durham CRO), it can certainly be said that Ambassador Morier's account of the origins of his Arctic obsession had at least something to recommend it.

One of the books Wiggins did read about the Siberian north before he went there was Wrangell's Polar sea, an account of a Russian expedition to the eastern end of Siberia's northern coastline in the early 1820s whose introduction said that

The effect of this information on an imaginative but shore-based Sunderland merchant seaman is easy to grasp. Perhaps he also read Georg Adolf Erman's Travels in Siberia of Reference Erman1848, a book occasioned by the pursuit of magnetic readings during which the author and his Norwegian collaborator took a detour from central to northern Siberia by travelling down the River Ob from south to north. Near the mouth of the river, more or less on the Arctic Circle, Erman was surprised to see

It is not hard to imagine Wiggins responding to this passage by wondering whether he could reach the mouth of the Ob from the north, by sailing there.

Apart from Wrangell and Erman, literature in English about any part of Siberia, let alone the Siberian north, was sparse at the time Wiggins began his voyages. S.S. Hill justified the publication of another book entitled Travels in Siberia in 1854 by pointing out that, of all the places he had seen in the course of a three year journey round the world, it described ‘countries concerning which the author has found the least genuine information current in Europe, and about which he has been most frequently interrogated since his return’ (Hill, Reference Hill1854, p. iii). George Kennan's Tent life in Siberia of Reference Kennan1870, an account of Kennan's part in the abortive attempt to link the USA and Europe by telegraph via Alaska, the Bering Strait and Siberia (rather than by cable under the Atlantic), inevitably paid more attention to the Siberian landmass than it did to the Siberian coastline (Kennan, Reference Kennan1870). Thus Wiggins could be forgiven for thinking that, in sailing to the Arctic, he was exploring more or less unknown seas.

After resigning from his post in Sunderland and making some adjustments to a Dundee whaler, he began his career as a specialist Arctic mariner in June 1874 by sailing via the north of Norway to the Barents Sea, Novaia Zemlia, the Kara Sea, and the mouths of the rivers Ob and Enisei. Between then and January 1895, when he described his Arctic voyages to a combined meeting of four interested St Petersburg societies, he sailed north ten times (Viggins, Reference Viggins1895, p. 7). His first concern, he wrote in 1877, had been ‘to test the correctness of [his] views’ about the navigability of northern waters (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins1877, p. 56). By reaching the Kara Sea, he satisfied himself that the Arctic could indeed be negotiated in the way he envisaged. In other words, he had ‘succeeded,’ he believed, ‘in thoroughly demonstrating the fact that the Gulf Stream and equatorial currents positively flow into this sea’ (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins1877, p. 57).

Having accomplished this first objective, Wiggins turned to trade. Although he took a cargo with him even in 1874, in 1876 he delivered goods much further. Not content with merely reaching the mouth of the Enisei, he entered the river, sailed up it to its confluence with the Kureika, left his ship and crew there and continued southwards on a river vessel to Turukhansk, Eniseisk and Krasnoiarsk (eventually making his way back to Europe by travelling across country to St Petersburg and from there to London). This ‘ascent of the Yenisei with the first European steamer and cargo that has ever reached so far into those regions in the annals of history,’ he wrote, ‘should surely be a convincing proof of the feasibility of this route for commerce’ (Wiggins, Reference Wiggins1877, p. 59). A decade later, in 1887, he conveyed a 400 ton cargo to Eniseisk without transferring it from one vessel to another, a voyage which made his ship, Phoenix, ‘the first commercial steamship to reach there from Europe’ (Viggins, Reference Viggins1895, p. 5). In 1894 he brought not just a single ship to Eniseisk but a small flotilla, for in that year he delivered two vessels built in northeast England for service on the River Angara.

In some ways Wiggins had chosen a propitious time for trading with Siberia. Although the region was not very well known to outsiders at the time he first went there, its economic potential as both market and source of raw materials was becoming clearer in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Its population rose from just under a million at the end of the eighteenth century to nearly three million in 1858, 5.76 million in 1897 and 9.37 million in 1911 (Dameshek et al., Reference Dameshek, Dameshek, Zinov´ ev, Remnev, Suvorova, Shakherov and Shilovskii2007, p. 345). A disproportionate number of the new inhabitants came from outside the region. Whereas, at the time of the pan-imperial census of 1897, only nine per cent of the subjects of the tsar came from provinces other than the one in which they were recorded, 23.4 per cent of Siberians did so (Troinitskii, Reference Troinitskii1905, p. xx). Because of their origins, many of the new Siberians knew what sort of goods were available elsewhere and wanted them for their new lives. Whilst they waited for them, they increased the output of their region. Having once been famous for sable, in the later nineteenth century Siberia was coming to be known for timber, iron, gold and diamonds, as well as the butter, milk, cheese and grain of its agriculturally productive southern latitudes. Selling western goods to Siberians and procuring Siberian raw materials for sale in the wider world were not unreasonable ambitions on Wiggins's part.

A number of Russian institutions and individuals responded positively to Wiggins's enterprise. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs backed his requests for permission to trade without paying duty and to bring his goods upriver under his own steam rather than in Russian vessels (RGIA 20/5/22, ff. 2–3, 6, 32a-b, 163–164). A number of separate decisions on the part of the Committee of Ministers had the cumulative effect of granting him duty-free trading rights for the seven years 1888–1894 inclusive (RGIA 20/5/22, ff. 76–81, 327). The Ministry of State Properties allowed him to sell Phoenix without paying duty in 1890 (RGIA 20/5/22, ff. 253, 257). Via the Ministry of Communications, the Navy Ministry tested the practicality of his Arctic route by ordering a consignment of rails from Bolcow Vaughan & Co. of Middlesbrough in northeast England for delivery by water to the central part of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1893 (RGIA 229/3/457, f. 10). For delivering these rails, the tsar gave Wiggins ‘a beautiful punchbowl service in massive silver’ (The Times, 14 February 1894, p. 3).

Wiggins also developed good relations with some prominent Siberians. In 1875 he corresponded with Mikhail Konstantinovich Sidorov, a merchant of Krasnoiarsk who had been exploiting the Enisei region for decades and had offered a reward to the first mariner to reach the mouths of the Ob and the Enisei as early as 1862 (Johnson, Reference Johnson1907, pp. 23, 68–73). Later, he forged bonds with Aleksandr Mikhailovich Sibiriakov, a gold merchant of Irkutsk, and Stepan Vasil´ evich Vostrotin, Mayor of Eniseisk, the second of whom came to northeast England to sail back to central Siberia via the Arctic at the end of his honeymoon in 1894 (Johnson, Reference Johnson1907, pp. 285–286; Kolotilo & Andrienko, Reference Kolotilo and Andrienko2005, p. 478; RGIA 20/5/22, ff. 248–251; 20/6/457, ff. 10, 17–18, 62, 66; Shishkin, Reference Shishkin2003, p. 642, n. 53; Tammiksaar & Stone, Reference Tammiksaar and Stone1997, p. 241; Trukan, Reference Trukan2003, p. 563, n. 12). All of these were local patriots who wanted to do business directly with the outside world rather than via the European part of the Russian Empire. Although they were not ‘Siberian regionalists’ in the political sense suggested by some contemporaries and discussed by later historians (Iadrintsev, Reference Iadrintsev1882; Dameshek et al., Reference Dameshek, Dameshek, Zinov´ ev, Remnev, Suvorova, Shakherov and Shilovskii2007, pp. 302–335), they nonetheless thought of their region as a discrete zone of the Russian Empire with its own aspirations. They offered the prospect of continuing support at the Asian end of Wiggins's operation.

In Britain, Wiggins accumulated all sorts of admirers, well-wishers, backers and imitators. Grasping the potential significance of his activities for the general course of Anglo-Russian relations, Sir Robert Morier spoke up for him not only in his despatch to the Prime Minister of 1888 but also in many letters to the Russian authorities (Ramm, Reference Ramm1973, pp. 305–329; RGIA 20/5/22, ff. 25, 36–37, 83–84, 166–175, 295; Stone, Reference Stone1995). In a letter of 1888 to K.P. Pobedonostsev (an official particularly close to the tsar), Morier gave an indication of the standing of the British businessmen with whom Wiggins was dealing when he pointed out that the sailor's principal British associates at that time were W.P. Gaskell, formerly a major in the British army, and H.N. Sulivan, ‘the son of an illustrious admiral’ (RGIA 20/5/22, f. 168). A lecture Wiggins gave to the Tyneside Geographical Society in northeast England in December 1889 so impressed the audience that Albert Grey (later fourth Earl Grey and Governor-General of Canada) organised a ‘North of England Committee’ to underwrite what proved to be a highly successful voyage to the Enisei in 1890 (which, ironically, Wiggins himself was unable to command because of conflicting duties in South America) (Anon., 1889/1890). Less commercially inclined associates of the mariner included the ornithologist Henry Seebohm, who travelled to Siberia with him in 1877, and the painter and travel writer Julius Mendes Price, who went with him to Eniseisk in 1890 and from there to China (Johnson, Reference Johnson1907, p. 135; Price, Reference Price1892). When Wiggins spoke on Siberia to the Tyneside Geographical Society in April 1894, the society's record-keeper observed that ‘it would seem that people never tire of hearing the account of life and work within the Arctic circle’; when he spoke again in March 1895, the venue was ‘filled in every part’ (Anon., 1894, p. 44; Wiggins, Reference Wiggins1895, p. 123). A British newspaper pointed out the advantages of the trade route that Wiggins had inaugurated when reporting the success of one of his associates in 1896:

After 1895, however, Wiggins sailed to the Enisei no more. What brought his Arctic voyages to an end? Three reasons stand out: problems posed by the route, insufficient support in Britain and resistance in Russia. By looking at these considerations in turn, the paper gradually transposes into the political concerns which figured significantly in the rather different Arctic exploits of Admiral Makarov.

Wiggins exaggerated the extent to which he had overcome the difficulty of sailing in the Russian north. Major Gaskell, one of his collaborators, put ‘the material difficulties of navigation’ first among the issues that the English mariner had to deal with (RGIA 20/5/22, ff. 125). The vessel he left at Goroshikha at the confluence of the rivers Enisei and Kureika in 1876 was shipwrecked there (and discovered 140 years later); he had an accident with Phoenix in 1888; his launch Ripple sank in the mouth of the Enisei in 1890; and because of a storm in the mouth of the Enisei in 1893, he could not deliver all the rails which the Russian Navy Ministry had asked him to convey into the heart of Siberia and had to have some of them taken back to Arkhangelsk and delivered to their destination the following spring (Johnson, Reference Johnson1907, p. 87; Guardian, 10 August 2016, p. 15; Manchester Guardian, 15 October 1877, p. 6; RGIA 20/5/22, ff. 147, 297–298; 20/6/457, f. 53; Tupper, Reference Tupper1965, p. 130). Shipwrecked once more in 1894, again in the lower reaches of the Enisei but this time in the course of making his way back to England after returning Vostrotin to Eniseisk and delivering the two English vessels which Russia had purchased for work on the River Angara, he had to cross more than 500 miles of tundra just to get to the River Pechora, a feat he could not have accomplished without help from the local reindeer hunters. Although he said that this final mishap had nothing to do with ice and could have happened to anyone, his temporary disappearance from view gave rise to alarm at both ends of his route, both of which mounted rescue missions (Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 5 January 1895, p. 8; 25 March 1895, p. 4; Viggins, Reference Viggins1895, pp. 8–9). Although, because of the reindeer hunters, the rescue missions proved to be unnecessary, they can hardly have encouraged potential future investors to commit large sums to his activities.

The problems posed by the route, however, paled into insignificance by comparison with the other two reasons why Wiggins's voyages came to an end. Although potential British investors were troubled by the risk associated with the voyages, they were not particularly well disposed towards them anyway, for Britain mistrusted Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. The two countries almost came to blows at the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. The émigré terrorist Sergei Stepniak, who published four substantial English language books about Russia in London in the 1880s, did not depict his homeland in glowing terms. Knowledge of Siberia was increasing in Britain, but from Wiggins's point of view much of the increase was taking place for the wrong reasons. James Young Simpson opened his Siberian travellogue of 1898 by saying that the region was ‘at once the reservoir of the Russian empire and its cesspool’ (Simpson, Reference Simpson1898, p. 1). Whereas Wiggins's interest lay in the ‘reservoir’ aspect, most British people thought first of the ‘cesspool’ aspect. The conditions of Siberian convicts were the subject of much discussion in the English-speaking world in the 1880s and 1890s. Although Henry Lansdell claimed in 1882 that ‘[m]uch has been written concerning [Siberian prisons and penal institutions] that is very unsatisfactory, and some things that are absolutely false’ (Lansdell, Reference Lansdell1882, p. v), it was difficult for Anglophone readers to accept this view after George Kennan published the condemnatory magazine articles which became his book Siberia and the exile system in 1891. Britain's principal late nineteenth and early twentieth century anti-tsarist social organisation, the ‘Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’, came into being in 1890 partly because of some particularly outrageous instances of tsarist repression in Siberia (Anon., 1890). To a considerable degree, furthermore, it owed its foundation to Robert Spence Watson, a prominent solicitor in the very part of England, the northeast, which was also home to Wiggins (Saunders, Reference Saunders1980). Wiggins himself found it ‘difficult to share the feeling of those who regard Russia in any other light than that of a friend’ (Johnson, Reference Johnson1907, p. 247), but his attitude went against the grain of British opinion. In a climate of Russophobia, which was partly sustained by reports of tsarist cruelty in Siberia, traders were unlikely to attract substantial British money for voyages to the Enisei.

Wiggins's biggest difficulty, however, was probably neither sailing in northern waters, nor circumventing Russophobia in Britain, but resistance in Russia. Broadly speaking, the obstacles he faced in Russia were of two types, economic and political. The first came in a number of forms, the most striking of which was opposition on the part of merchants in the European part of the Russian Empire to the possibility that, if he succeeded in establishing a regular trade route via the Arctic, merchants in Siberia would cut Russia's European merchants out of the Siberian market. The Times of London frequently reported opposition on the part of merchants in European Russia to Wiggins's duty-free trading privileges (10 September 1888, p. 5; 9 August 1890, p. 5; 21 November 1891, p. 5).

Even Siberian merchants, however, sometimes caused Wiggins difficulty, for they were never wholly convinced of the practicality of his route and were slow to establish dependable river transport from the mouth of the Enisei to the towns much further south where the goods that Wiggins brought from England were to be sold. Among the problems Wiggins faced, his associate, Major Gaskell, rated the caution of the Siberian merchants second only to the Englishman's purely nautical difficulties. ‘[T]he numerous failures which have occurred in the attempts to import merchandise by the sea route,’ Gaskell wrote, had engendered ‘profound distrust. . . in the minds of the energetic merchants and industrials [sic] in the basins of the Obi and Jennesei’ (RGIA 20/5/22, f. 125).

Later, the English traders made clear that they could not continue their voyages ‘unless . . . the Russians and Siberians are found ready to undertake the Siberian and Russian portion of the task’ (RGIA 20/6/457, f. 8).

But the most damaging of all the economic obstacles Wiggins faced in Russia was the fact that the general tenor of Russian economic policy at the end of the nineteenth century was protectionist. Although, at one time or another, many Russian agencies (and the tsar) showed Wiggins favour, the Ministry of Finance, which was responsible for commerce, was always cautious in its dealings with him. When I.A. Vyshnegradskii, Minister of Finance, acknowledged in 1887 that exceptional permission for foreigners to engage in duty-free trade had been granted in the past, he pointed out that it had been given only with the sanction of the Committee of Ministers, only in respect of certain goods, and only for a single trading season. Wiggins could have permission, therefore, ‘only for a specific cargo, not in the form of a general concession for several years ahead’ (RGIA 20/5/22, f. 5). In granting the English enterprise some trading privileges in 1888, the Finance Ministry wanted to know the size of Wiggins's new ship, refused to let him market certain goods without paying duty, stated that it would always require detailed lists of the things he was planning to bring to Russia, and said that, if it were to put a request to the Committee of Ministers for a trading concession of more than a year, it would ask only for three years and not just on behalf of traders from England. Wiggins and his associates had to press hard to get the initial five year concession they eventually received (RGIA 20/5/22, ff. 52–53, 59–60, 62–64, 85–87). In October 1891, in the fourth year of Wiggins's initial concession, a detailed report to the Ministry of Finance from the Excise Department of Eastern Siberia claimed that the English were undercutting Russia's European merchants by charging less for the goods they brought to Siberia than the same goods cost when brought by subjects of the tsar from European Russia, and that they were selling more in Siberia than they were buying there for sale in the West (which had the effect of impoverishing Siberia instead of enriching it) (RGIA 20/6/457, ff. 26–44). The exasperation that this and other worries provoked in Wiggins and his associates characterised all the correspondence between the English entrepreneurs and Russia's commercial authorities.

The economic issues that confronted Wiggins were the surface manifestation of a larger political difficulty. The point of Russia's protectionist economic policy was to allow the country to grow strong behind tariff walls, an objective which was incompatible with unlimited encouragement of foreigners. In the political climate which obtained in Russia in the 1890s, Wiggins was at the mercy of the sort of hostility to be found in a contemporary Russian language memorandum entitled On the drawbacks of allowing foreigners to cross the Kara Sea, which made various claims that were inimical to Wiggins's ambitions: that the Northern Sea Route was not a discovery of foreigners; that, unlike his sixteenth century British predecessor Richard Chancellor, Wiggins was not travelling on his own initiative but had been enticed into sailing north by Sidorov's offer of a prize; and that vigorous Siberian peasants and flourishing Siberian agriculture ought to serve the interests of European Russia rather than those of foreigners (RGIA 95/3/816). To judge by the strength of feeling on display in this memorandum, some late nineteenth century Russians found Wiggins's activities extremely unwelcome.

Admiral Makarov

The economic and political resistance which Wiggins encountered opened the door for the politically motivated Arctic exploits of Vice-Admiral Makarov. Although, as a serving officer, Makarov owed his primary allegiance to the Navy Ministry, it was not the Navy Ministry that sponsored his Arctic voyages. Although he was not a commercial entrepreneur, his northern work was facilitated by the principal overseer of tsarist commerce, the Ministry of Finance. In the light of the previous section of the present paper, these paradoxes may not be as striking as they seem to be at first sight. Wiggins's dealings with the Russian Ministry of Finance had been difficult. Although the Ministry welcomed the commercial benefits his voyages promised, it wanted them to accrue to Russia, not to foreigners. This trend in its thinking became more pronounced after the appointment of Sergei Witte as Minister in 1892. Between 1892 and 1903, Witte was the most powerful person in Russia below the tsar. He was a modernising nationalist. All his plans were designed to accelerate Russia's economic development and increase the state's international authority. Although he invited foreign investment (and took Russia on to the gold standard to encourage it), and although he was by no means wholly averse to the employment of foreign expertise, he never forgot that the point of embracing western modernity was to promote Russian interests (Harcave, Reference Harcave2004; Martynov, Reference Martynov2002; Shepelev, Reference Shepelev2007, pp. 299–370; Vitte, Reference Vitte2003; Wcislo, Reference Wcislo2011). In the Arctic, Makarov served his purposes perfectly.

In view of Witte's background in railway administration and the lasting fame he achieved as the most important single figure in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, it is tempting to suppose that he was hostile to waterborne trade on principle. This was not the case. He was just as enthusiastic about developing Siberia's northern coastline as he was about speeding up communication with the region by rail, but his approach to the Russian north differed signally from that of Wiggins. Apart from being determined to keep Russia's Arctic activities in the hands of Russians, he also wanted to make his northern policy a further expression of his lifelong commitment to Russian ‘modernisation’ by showing what could be done in the north by the application of innovative technology. His geopolitical interests, furthermore, did not figure at all in Wiggins's ambitions. If, by improving communication via the Arctic, he could put the western and eastern parts of the Russian Empire in closer touch with one another, he could greatly increase not only the vigour of the imperial economy, but also St Petersburg's capacity to project its power in far-flung parts of the word.

In view of these ambitions, it is easy to understand why Witte welcomed Makarov's proposals for the development of Russia's ice-bound seas. The two men were kindred spirits, for Makarov too was a modernising nationalist, keen to employ western methods in pursuit of strictly Russian goals. The admiral was on the way to becoming one of the most celebrated of all Russian seamen, commemorated today in the name of an embankment on Vasilˊevskii Island in St Petersburg and by a massive statue outside the Cathedral at nearby Kronstadt. He first demonstrated his instinct for nautical modernity by pioneering the use of torpedoes off Batumi in the Black Sea during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. In 1880–1881 he manifested his Russian nationalism by participating in General Skobelev's onslaught of 1880–1881 against the indigenous peoples of western Central Asia. After further distinguishing himself as a sailor in a round the world voyage of scientific observation in the years 1886–1889, he turned his attention to the Russian north. In this sphere he showed his enthusiasm for technological modernity by advocating the construction of ocean-going icebreakers (Josephson, Reference Josephson2014, pp. 26, 35–36; Semanov, Reference Semanov1988; Vrangelˊ, 1911/Reference Vrangelˊ1913). These were to be at the heart of his dealings with Witte and the physical embodiment of Russian modernisation in the Arctic.

To get his ambitious plan for large-scale icebreakers underway, Makarov had to find an influential and wealthy backer, for, until the end of the nineteenth century, icebreakers were small and served only in harbours and on rivers and lakes. To propose building ships of this class that could handle the much thicker ice of the Arctic looked foolhardy. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Makarov failed to persuade the Russian Navy Minister, Admiral Tyrtov, of the merits of building them for this purpose (Samarov & Shlomin, 1953–Reference Samarov and Shlomin1960, p. 347). Typically, he did not give up. In Dmitrii Mendeleev, the celebrated chemist who served as Head of the Imperial Bureau of Weights and Measures (and happened to be a Siberian), he found a sympathiser. Mendeleev facilitated a meeting between Makarov and Witte on the question of Russia's northern seas (Samarov & Shlomin, 1953–Reference Samarov and Shlomin1960, pp. 355, 359). At first, even the imaginative and ambitious Witte was cautious. Not long before, he had been bruised by Nicholas II's decision to promote Russian naval development in the Baltic rather than the Arctic (Vitte, Reference Vitte2003, pp. 395–398). Perhaps even he thought that icebreakers were a high-risk way of approaching the problems posed by the Russian Arctic. He required Makarov to acquire some first-hand knowledge of the north and then submit a written proposal. In 1897, the admiral made the necessary voyage by tagging along with one of Wiggins's mercantile English successors. His report convinced the Minister (Makarov Reference Makarov1898). Very unusually, Witte committed the Ministry of Finance to the construction of a ship. This was to be Ermak, a vessel which, at the time of its launch in 1898, was the largest icebreaker in the world (Samarov & Shlomin, 1953–Reference Samarov and Shlomin1960, p. 362).

The decision to build Ermak on the authority of the Ministry of Finance was unusual not just because the ministry did not normally have ships on its books, but in view of the fact that, because no Russian shipyard had the expertise to build the vessel, Ermak had to be built abroad. In keeping with his policy of promoting Russian industry, Witte had been trying to prevent agencies of the Russian government from draining the exchequer by spending money abroad. In 1895 he had written a long letter to State Secretary A.N. Kulomzin complaining that the extent of Russia's foreign orders in the year 1894 contravened an edict of 1866 whose purpose had been to keep foreign orders in check (RGAVMF 427/1/208, f. 175, sub-folios 2–5). At the time of the construction of Ermak, all Russian governmental agencies were being obliged to give Witte's Finance Ministry annual lists of their foreign purchases (the Navy Ministry and the Ministry of Communications being much the biggest spenders). In view of the fact that, when Witte commissioned Ermak, he deviated from his own policy of not buying abroad, he must have seen particular merit in Makarov's plan. And so he did: as he put it in his memoirs, he was bent on two things, improving winter navigation in the Baltic, ‘but mainly, trying to find out whether it was possible to get through to the Far East via the northern seas, along the northern coast of Siberia’ (Vitte, Reference Vitte2003, p. 558). Establishing speedier maritime communication with the Russian Far East would have assisted him in knitting together the far-flung extremities of the world's largest political entity.

After an international competition, the contract for Ermak went to Armstrong's, a company in Wiggins's part of England. The staff there were used to building icebreakers. In a sense, indeed, they were responsible for the world's very first icebreaker, a vessel called Pilot which they built as a tug in 1862 but which the Kronstadt merchant M.A. Britnev turned into an icebreaker shortly afterwards. A recent history of tsarist Russia's icebreakers indulges in speculation about the provenance of Pilot and prints a misleading imaginary drawing of it (Andrienko, Reference Andrienko2009, pp. 51–53, 57), but there is no doubt about its origins, for Henry Swan, one of Armstrong's longest-serving members of staff, referred to it in his speech at the launch of Ermak in October 1898. ‘By a curious coincidence,’ he said, ‘. . . the very first ice-breaker was built in that yard [that is, Armstrong's]. . . She also was for Russia – for the port of Cronstadt, where she was still navigating’ (Newcastle Daily Journal, 31 October 1898, p. 5). Makarov echoed these words in a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in February 1899:

The designer's original drawing of that ‘steam tug’ is still on file among the builder's records (TWAS DS.VA/2/5296). Since Armstrong's had been building other icebreakers for internal and coastal use in Russia just before it received the order for Ermak (including Baikal, a vital cog in the early history of the Trans-Siberian Railway), and since it proposed to build the new ship more quickly and cheaply than its German and Danish competitors in the bidding process (Makarov, Kuznetsov & Dolgova, Reference Makarov, Kuznetsov and Dolgova2010, p. 155), it was the natural choice for Makarov's commission.

This is not the place for a complete history of Makarov's icebreaker, which in due course became famous and survived until 1964. Most of the documents pertaining to its construction and early life are in print (Samarov & Shlomin, 1953–Reference Samarov and Shlomin1960, pp. 343–450; Vize, Reference Vize1943). A recent volume reprints Makarov's own account of the vessel's early years, reproduces some of the English builder's photographs of it and includes three studies of its later life (Makarov et al., Reference Makarov, Kuznetsov and Dolgova2010). Publications of this kind mark the importance of the vessel as the world's first large ocean-going icebreaker. In the context of an essay about its early days, however, the point usually made about it is that it failed to achieve its immediate objectives. As a result, the political intent underlying its construction has tended to be overlooked.

Part of the reason it failed may be that Witte and Makarov imagined too many goals for it. Not surprisingly, Makarov spoke very enthusiastically about its potential when, in 1897, he was trying to secure funds for its construction. In a paper he gave to the Russian Academy of Sciences at that time, he envisaged the new vessel not only taking on the work in which Wiggins had been engaged (communicating with the mouth of the Enisei), but also keeping the port of St Petersburg free of ice and exploring the Arctic as a whole (Makarov, Reference Makarov1897; Samarov & Shlomin, 1953–Reference Samarov and Shlomin1960, p. 351, n. 1). Perhaps he would have done better if he had been more single-minded.

The main reason why the ship was not a success, however, was that its design was too complex. The forward screw, and the bow in general, gave endless trouble. Although the 48 compartments into which the hull was divided ensured that Ermak had a high degree of protection against shipwreck (because damage could be confined to the point of penetration), the ship nevertheless still experienced almost as many misfortunes as Wiggins's vessels. Its early voyages took it not to the Kara Sea, but back to the English yard where it was constructed for the removal of the forward screw and other extensive repairs. Ermak did not prove the value of employing large icebreakers for Arctic work. Although, as late as December 1902, Makarov still thought that it was ‘not impossible to believe that it will succeed in penetrating into places which have never yet been visited by man and remain completely unstudied’ (Samarov & Shlomin, 1953–Reference Samarov and Shlomin1960, p. 441), not many of his contemporaries agreed with him. When the Admiral was blown up by a mine at Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War on 31 March/13 April 1904, the ship lost its only real champion. After 1905 it served only the least ambitious of the purposes for which it had been designed, that of breaking up ice in the Baltic. Although, when he gained access to Witte, Makarov had found someone who shared his nationalist vision, he had failed to demonstrate that deploying ultra-modern technology in Russia's northern waters was a better contribution to the development of the Russian Empire than Wiggins's simple dedication to trade.