Peter Dobell, a merchant who had lived for years in China and then served the Russian crown, published this travel memoir in London in 1830. He journeyed himself through Kamchatka, the Koryak lands and on to Okhotsk and Yakutsk, writing about reindeer herders, fishing villages, dwellings, food and the hardships of the road. The Tartars are barely present: the word appears only when he compares the faces of Siberian peoples with 'the Tartars', meaning the Manchus who ruled China. This corpus copy is volume I of the 1830 London edition (Colburn and Bentley), a Google scan.
How they knew
Eyewitness
Who “Tartar” means here
Mainly the Manchu rulers of China ('the Tartars, who have conquered China', 'Pekin Tartars'), used as a yardstick for describing the faces of Koryaks and Tungus.
Why read it
Shows how, by 1830, a well-travelled merchant used 'Tartar' almost as a racial type and as a name for the Manchus, rather than for any Siberian people he met.
Watch out
Only volume I is in the corpus and it says very little about Tartars; the 'cream of tartar' mentions are a medicine, not a people. His physical comparisons are impressions, not evidence of descent.
Editorial contextDobell says the Tungus he met on the Okhotsk to Yakutsk road looked strikingly like 'the Tartars, who have conquered China', meaning the Manchus. His two Cantonese servants, who had seen Manchu bannermen in Beijing, agreed, and the servants and the Tungus greeted each other as 'brats', Russian for brothers. It is a vivid glimpse of 'Tartar' meaning Manchu in an English book of 1830.
means of my two Chinese servants, who were born in Canton, and had seen many of the Pekin Tartars, and were themselves struck with the likeness between them and the Tongusees. They always called each other brats (which means, in Russian, brothers) when they met
Editorial contextMeeting a Chukchi man and the Reindeer Koryaks in northern Kamchatka, Dobell sorts them by looks: the Chukchi resemble North American Indians, while the Koryaks have the high cheekbones and small eyes 'by which the Tartars are distinguished'. Here 'Tartar' is simply a label for an East Asian face type, not a nation he met.
The Reindeer Karaikees, on the contrary, have those very high cheek bones and small eyes, as well as those features generally by which the Tartars are distinguished; and they certainly resemble much the Northern Chinese.