Stepan Krasheninnikov (1711-1755), a Moscow-born student attached to the Great Northern Expedition, was sent ahead to Kamchatka in 1737 and spent four years travelling the peninsula with interpreters and reading the records of the Russian forts. His Description of the Land of Kamchatka appeared in Russian in 1755, the year he died, with material from the naturalist Georg Steller. This corpus copy is James Grieve's shortened English translation, published at Gloucester in 1764. It covers geography, animals, plants and the Kamchadals (Itelmen), Koryaks and Kurils; the Tartars appear only when he asks where the Kamchadals came from.
How they knew
Part eyewitness
Who “Tartar” means here
The peoples of the Amur valley (the 'Tartars who live upon the river Amur'), kept distinct from the Mongols ('Mungals'). The Kamchadals themselves are never called Tartars.
Why read it
A good example of eighteenth-century scholars sorting Siberian peoples into families by language, looks and tools: Krasheninnikov argues that the Kamchadals came from the Mongols, not the Tartars.
Watch out
Very little here is about Tartars. The origin theory is learned guesswork (partly Steller's), not tradition, and it rests on racial stereotypes of the time. Grieve's English is an abridgment.
Editorial contextAsking where the Kamchadals came from, Krasheninnikov separates the 'Mungals' from the 'Tartars who live upon the river Amur'. His reasoning: if they had come from the Tartars they would have settled on the empty, fertile Lena rather than cold Kamchatka. He also claims the Mungals had used iron for two thousand years while 'the other Tartars' made knives and daggers of copper, yet the Kamchadals knew no iron at all.
The following reasons incline us to think that they take their origin from the Mungals, not from the Tartars who live upon the river Amur, nor from the Kuriles or Japanese; for if they had sprung from the Tartars it is probable they would have settled about the river Lena
Stepan Krasheninnikov (translated by James Grieve, 1764)
Editorial contextHe concludes that the Kamchadals once lived in 'Mungalia beyond the river Amur' and were one people with the Mongols, pushed out to the edge of the world by 'Eastern conquerors', much as the Lapps and Samoyeds were pushed north in Europe. His evidence is a list of word endings he thought sounded 'Mungal Chinese', and a list of shared bodily features and supposed character traits.
Thus it appears likely, that the Kamtschadales lived formerly in Mungalia beyond the river Amur, and made one people with the Mungals, which is farther confirmed by the following observations, such as the Kamtschadales having several words common to the Mungal Chinese language, as their terminations in ong, ing, oang, chin, cha, ching
Stepan Krasheninnikov (translated by James Grieve, 1764)
Editorial contextDescribing the root voles of Kamchatka, which store roots in neat many-roomed nests, Krasheninnikov compares their mass migrations to the moves of 'the wandering tartars'. When the rats left, the Kamchadals feared a wet year and poor hunting; when they came back, messengers ran to spread the good news. The simile shows that by the 1750s 'Tartar' was shorthand for nomads who move with the seasons.
These rats change their habitations like the wandering tartars, and sometimes for a certain number of years they all leave Kamtschatka, and go to some other place. This retirement is very alarming to the Kamtschadales, who think it forebodes a rainy season and a bad year for the chace
Stepan Krasheninnikov (translated by James Grieve, 1764)