Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklukho-Maclay. N

Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklukho-Maclay (1846–1888) Born in the village of Rozhdestvenskoye, former Novgorod province, into the family of an engineer. He studied at St. Petersburg University and joined the student democratic circle there. In 1864, university authorities followed up

Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovsky The disappearance of Sturmer happened as simply and imperceptibly as his entry was solemn. No official farewells, as when Sazonov left, no addresses from the department, no farewell visits, at least in the form

Nikolai Nikolaevich GUBENKO - When and where did you meet Vysotsky? - Most likely here, in the theater. I came here in 1964, a month before the founding of the new Taganka. We had a play at VGIK called “The Career of Arthur Wee,” and we have been playing it for about a year. And they played on different

Essay by Lydia Chukovskaya “N. N. Miklouho-Maclay" is part of a series of popular essays about remarkable Russian travelers. The scientific editors of the series include: corresponding member. Academy of Sciences of the USSR N.N. Baransky, Doctor of Geographical Sciences M. S. Bodnarsky, Doctor of Geographical Sciences E. M. Murzaev, Professor K. A. Salishchev, Corresponding Member. Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR A. I. Solovyov.

In the summer of 1869, the leading Russian journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, published under the editorship of Saltykov-Shchedrin, Nekrasov and Eliseev, published (without a signature) the article “Civilization and Wild Tribes.” At first glance, the author’s intentions were the most modest: to inform Russian readers about scientific disputes in the anthropological societies of Paris and London. But in reality, the meaning of the article was deeper: the magazine reported on the violence inflicted on peaceful peoples by the governments of countries that call themselves advanced. Travelers who visited the Pacific Islands in the sixties noted that “the native population of Polynesia is constantly dying out in those places where Europeans have settled, even in small numbers.” Retelling the scientific debate about the causes of this phenomenon, the author of the article, in addition to numerous facts of violence against the peoples of Polynesia, cites the facts of the monstrous massacres of the Americans against the Indians, the British against the Australians, and ends the article with the exclamation: “this is a disgrace for the praised civilization!” “In California, in the Nemecul Valley,” the publicist reports, “in the winter of 1858/59, more than 150 Indians with their wives and children were killed; in broad daylight they killed unarmed people and women with babies in their arms.” What explains the inevitable death of native tribes when they collide with “civilized peoples”? And many of the Western European scientists answered that these tribes are incapable, you see, of civilization. In their opinion, “not all races have the ability to improve,” and this, it turns out, is the reason that, coming into contact with civilized peoples, the tribes of the Pacific Islands and California begin to die out.

At that time, there was fierce debate among scientists around the question of the origin and development of human races. Some (polygenists) tried to prove that different peoples descended from several different trunks; others (monogenists) - that all humanity came from one root, from one trunk. A white man and a black man, polygenists argued, are two different breeds people, as dissimilar to each other as an owl and an eagle... And from this they drew a conclusion that was far from genuine science, but beneficial to slave owners of all stripes: human races unequal; the difference in the cultural level of peoples depends on irresistible “innate properties”; not all races are endowed with the same ability to develop; “whites” are supposedly destined by nature to dominate, “coloreds” - to submit...

Among the scientists of that time, the Russian academician Baer was a follower of the theory of the unity of the origin of the human race. He stated that all the claims of polygenists, who seek to downplay the physical and spiritual powers of “colored people,” are based on untested material, and that for a truly scientific solution to the issue it is necessary to comprehensively study people of different races - from civilized Europeans to uncultured inhabitants of tropical countries. “It is desirable, one might even say necessary for science, to study the inhabitants of New Guinea,” Baer wrote in one of his articles.

In the same 1869, the young Russian scientist Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay turned to the Geographical Society with a request to discuss the program of his planned multi-year journey to the Pacific Ocean on the unexplored coast of New Guinea and to obtain permission for him to go there on board one of the military ships. At that time he was only 23 years old, but he had already earned fame in Russia and other countries as the author of interesting articles on the anatomy of sponges, on the morphology of the brain of cartilaginous fish, and as a brave explorer of the shores of the Red Sea. Miklouho-Maclay was a natural scientist by education, a zoologist by profession, and a researcher of lower organisms. But Miklouho-Maclay’s journey to New Guinea was not the journey of only a zoologist, botanist or anatomist. He went there primarily as an anthropologist, and in anthropology he was occupied with the main question that gave the expedition to New Guinea wide public interest.

“Time, I am sure, will prove that I was right in choosing my main task,” Miklouho-Maclay later wrote. - I consider the issues of zoogeography of this area very interesting... and yet I considered it more important: to draw my attention to... the life of the Papuans, believing that these phases of life of this part of humanity under some new conditions (which can appear every day) very quickly passing away.”

This is what became the “main task” for Miklouho-Maclay. He went to New Guinea not so much to collect zoological collections as to study the Papuans. He chose New Guinea as the site of his many years of research because this island was inhabited by a primitive tribe, the study of which could provide an answer to the central question posed by anthropology; The material collected in New Guinea was supposed, according to Maclay, to confirm the teachings of the monogenists. Maclay understood that he had to hurry: if the European colonialists came to New Guinea, the Papuans would be in trouble. Then it will be too late to start studying them.

In the seventies of the 19th century, capitalist powers, in search of sales markets and markets for raw materials, tirelessly captured more and more islands, more and more new areas on the continents. “From 1876 to 1914,” writes V.I. Lenin, “six “great” powers plundered 25 million square meters. kilometers, i.e. the space is 21/2 times larger than all of Europe! Six powers enslave over half a billion (523 million) of the population in the colonies... And everyone knows that the colonies were conquered by fire and sword, that in the colonies the population is brutally treated, that it is exploited in thousands of ways...” (V.I. Lenin. Works, ed. 4th, vol. 21, p. 275.).

Miklouho-Maclay understood: the day when the tribes of New Guinea would encounter Europeans was close.

The Russian Geographical Society obtained permission for the young scientist to go to the Pacific Ocean on board the corvette Vityaz, a military vessel that was part of the Pacific squadron.

On November 8, 1870, the “Vityaz” left the port of Kronstadt and, visiting Copenhagen, Madeira Island, Easter Island, Tahiti, the Samoan Islands, and the island of New Ireland along the way, on the three hundred and forty-sixth day of the journey, September 19, 1871, dropped anchor in Astrolabe Bay , on the northeastern coast of New Guinea.

43 years before this day, in 1827, Astrolabe Bay was discovered by the French navigator Dumont D'Urville and named after the ship on which the traveler sailed. However, fearing fever and the unknown inhabitants of the island, Dumont D'Urville did not go ashore and took pictures from the ship. Miklouho-Maclay was thus the first European to risk settling on an unknown shore.

But the day of September 19, 1871 is memorable not only for Maclay’s arrival in New Guinea. On September 19, the first lines of one of the most remarkable books in the history of mankind were written. This book - Miklouho-Maclay's diary - lay hidden for many decades after the author's death and was published only after the Great October Socialist Revolution.

The diary of Miklouho-Maclay is an invaluable source for studying the life of primitive peoples. The Papuans of Astrolabe Bay, among whom the traveler settled, never communicated with other peoples and at that time preserved their primitive way of life completely intact. Miklouho-Maclay talks in detail and in detail about the morals and customs of the inhabitants of the island: about what kind of funeral and wedding ceremonies the Papuans have, how the Papuans hunt, how they educate children, how they cultivate the land, how they build pies, how they make fabric from bark. Everything he saw Miklouho-Maclay wrote down, sketched, recorded carefully, conscientiously, accurately - be it the height of a mountain or the depth of a bay, the beak of a bird, the ornament on the side of a pirogue or the hair of a child.

Key to Understanding Structure primitive society at the beginning of the seventies it was not yet in the hands of science; the book of Morgan, who, in the words of Engels, “found the key to the most important mysteries of ancient history” (K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. XVI, part I, p. 8.), was published only in 1877, the book Engels “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” - in 1884. But the material collected by Miklouho-Maclay anticipated the later conclusions of theoretical scientists. This material indicates that production and consumption among the Papuans were of a collective nature, that they had no trade, that the only division of labor known to them was division by sex and age, that the basic unit of their society was the clan, that their society was primitive communist . Miklouho-Maclay's diary gives us, as it were, a photographic snapshot, a truthful and accurate portrait of a primitive tribe, made without distortion or embellishment.

This portrait is all the more precious for us because there are almost no primitive tribes left in the world who never communicated with peoples of a higher culture, and with them the direct opportunity to observe early stage development of human society, through which all nations once passed.

But Miklouho-Maclay’s diary is not only a portrait of a little-studied tribe; in a sense, this is a self-portrait. Line by line, page by page - and gradually through these lines, in which, at first glance, so little is said about the author, appears, perhaps against his own will, next to the faces of the Papuans, against the backdrop of mountains, coconut palms and the ocean, another face: the appearance of an amazing, extraordinary person, a portrait of himself, Maclay, a Russian scientist, educator, humanist.

The first thing that strikes you in Miklouho-Maclay’s diary is the respect with which all his judgments about the natives are imbued. He constantly calls the faces of the Papuans kind, soft, intelligent, sincerely admires the flexibility, harmony, dexterity of movements of the natives, rejoices at their honesty, their understanding, their intelligence. If something unpleasantly surprises him in the customs and morals of the Papuans, he does not rush to ridicule and condemn someone else’s custom from the point of view of the self-satisfied morality of the European man in the street, but, as befits a scientist, tries to understand it and explain it historically. For him, the Papuans of New Guinea, whom he came to study at the risk of his own life, are not guinea pigs or slaves, but first of all people - the same people he saw everywhere, only many times more interesting. In dealing with the natives, he demands from himself the same fairness and delicacy as in dealing with any other people. When, for the first time seeing a white man close to their huts, the natives grabbed their spears, the scientist was not indignant, but found this gesture completely natural: after all, this was their region, their village, their forest, they did not invite Miklouho-Maclay to their place.

“I somehow felt embarrassed myself,” Maclay writes in his diary, “why do I come to embarrass these people?”

We can say with confidence that colonial travelers, such as Stanley, who invariably referred to African blacks in his notes as dishonest, cruel, cowardly, and greedy, never experienced such awkwardness.

The Papuans of Astrolabe Bay were people of the Stone Age, Miklouho-Maclay was one of the foremost scientists of modern civilization. But the scientist was not inclined to despise the Papuan on the grounds that he chops down a tree with a clumsy stone ax, eats not with a spoon, but with some kind of shell, does not know a plow and a plow, and crushes the earth almost with his bare hands. On the contrary: in his diary, he speaks with admiration about the hard work of people who have achieved excellent cultivation of the land, despite the scarcity and primitiveness of their agricultural tools, who can make complex artistic designs with simple bones and cut meat with bones no worse than with a steel knife.

Having settled into the Papuan villages and made friends with their inhabitants, the enlightened scientist did not hesitate to smear his forehead with black paint in the Papuan style - as a sign of mourning for one of the native women, thereby wanting to express his condolences to the husband of the deceased; and until he earned the full trust of the Papuans, and they themselves did not want to introduce their wives, daughters and sisters to him, he warned from afar of his approach with a whistle: let the women hide, if such is their custom.

But next to the delicacy and kindness that forced Miklouho-Maclay, constantly ill, suffering from fever and wounds on his legs, to rush through the difficult forest to the village to help one of the native patients; Along with the traits of gentleness, kindness, and delicacy, Miklouho-Maclay’s diary from the very first pages reveals another trait in the author - fearlessness in the literal sense of the word, that is, a complete absence of fear. Combined with gentleness and kindness, this trait is amazing. He had just arrived, had just moved to an island where no European had ever been before. He is told that his future neighbors are cannibals, that they are treacherous, cunning, cruel and hate whites. Maclay is on his guard: on the eve of the departure of the Vityaz, he shows the sailors the tree under which he will bury all the collected scientific material if he feels that he is “not good enough.” But on September 27, the Vityaz raises anchor and sets sail. As a sign of farewell, Maclay orders his servant, the Swede Ohlson, to lower the flag over the tree. Ohlson is in despair: after all, the Papuans can rush at the aliens every minute, and the corvette’s guns are getting further and further away... His hands are shaking, and he is unable to lower the flag. “I myself saluted the departing ship,” writes Maclay, outraged by Ohlson’s cowardice.

On October 1, the scientist went to the Papuan village closest to the cape on which he settled. He set off without taking with him either a gun or a revolver. Why? “I am convinced that some bullet fired at the wrong time,” he explained in his diary, “can make achieving the trust of the natives impossible, that is, completely destroy all chances of success of the enterprise.” And he took with him only a notebook and a pencil. The natives greeted the uninvited guest with hostility. Several arrows flew near his head. How did he respond to the arrows? He did not yet know the Papuan language. How can you explain your good intentions to the natives? The traveler spreads a mat on the ground and, among the armed men who had just threatened him with death, goes to bed. “I'm not afraid of you; I came to you unarmed and I believe that you will not offend me either,” that’s what he said with this simple act. An act unparalleled in resourcefulness and courage! The most amazing thing is that Miklouho-Maclay not only decided to go to bed among the people who were aiming at him a minute ago, but also fell asleep. “I slept for more than two hours,” he writes in his diary. For this two-hour sleep, it was necessary not only to feel tired, which, with his characteristic modesty, he himself refers to, but also to experience absolutely no fear, which he is silent about.

Maclay's inherent modesty is evident on every page of his diary. Miklouho-Maclay narrates everything that happened to him in Astrolabe Bay in such an even, calm tone that the reader inevitably begins to feel as if, in fact, there was absolutely nothing special about his dangerous life in New Guinea. I walked through the forest, saw big mushrooms; went to the Papuan village where they wanted to kill him, and did not move when he saw spears aimed at his chest; again wandered through the forest, saw an eagle bird; fell ill with tropical fever and during a fatal attack was not able to lift a spoon with medicine to his mouth, but three times a day he crawled on all fours onto the veranda to record meteorological observations. All this is told calmly, without any exclamation marks or pauses, even a little monotonously: about mushrooms in the same voice as about spears.

Any word, not only sublime, but also any kind of elevated, loud word was organically alien to Maclay, and we will not find the words “duty of a scientist” in his diary, just as we will not find the words “courage” or “bravery.” However, anyone who thinks about life's path this man, it will become clear that, although Maclay never mentions the duty of a scientist in his diary, the highest idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthis duty was inherent in him; and although he nowhere speaks of the duties of a civilized European to people at a low stage of development, nevertheless he always fulfilled them.

If this were not so, if science had not owned all his thoughts, would he have been able, as is clear from his diary, day after day, week after week, without giving himself rest even during illness, and thereby shortening his life by twenty years? your life - walk through swamps and mountains day after day, measure, inspect, accumulate materials, record, compare? Having settled in New Guinea, he slept little and ate poorly; It always seemed to him that he would not have time to properly fulfill his obligations. A noble greed for knowledge of the world drove him through impenetrable forests. “I regret that I don’t have a hundred eyes,” he wrote in his diary. This seems to be the only complaint we will find in his notes. The beans made him very angry: they cooked too slowly, they took up time... The world, never seen by any European, just accepted by Maclay under high hand science, required recognition and accounting. In this new world, everything had to be examined, described, preserved. Not a single leaf of the majestic trees, standing as if on supports on arched aerial roots, should not have been an abyss for botany, not a single jellyfish flickering in the blackness of the night ocean - for zoology, not a single song falling from the lips of the Papuans - for ethnography. It was necessary to measure Papuan heads, measure soil temperature and water temperature, measure the height of mountains, dissect birds, identify plant species, collect utensils, hair, jewelry and weapons of the natives; you had to see Papuan funerals and Papuan weddings and watch how the Papuans peel coconuts - where can you think about sleep and food!

Miklouho-Maclay was not only a researcher; he became the educator of the tribe among whom he settled. He gave the natives seeds of useful plants, he taught them to use metal tools and tirelessly, through his own behavior, showed them an example of justice and respect for human dignity. He describes in his diary how once, at a time when the natives no longer considered him a stranger, he noticed a “couscous” in a Papuan hut - an animal he had never seen before. The scientist wanted to take the couscous home and explore it. He offered a knife in exchange for couscous. “But the children of Gorendu will cry if they are not allowed to taste the meat,” the natives explained to him in embarrassment.

“I knew very well,” we read in the diary, “that if I took the animal and took it home, none of the inhabitants of Gorendu would dare to oppose this, but I did not want to act unfairly and take over someone else’s property by force.”

The reasoning is modest and, it would seem, it was expressed on the most insignificant occasion. Whether children cry in a nondescript Papuan village, which no one in the civilized world has ever heard of, or whether they taste fried meat - does it matter? However, this modest reasoning reflected the scientist’s deep thoughts about the essence of the responsible word “culture.” Indeed: if you just find yourself in unknown latitudes and you lose your sense of justice, if you lose respect for human dignity just because there is a person with a different skin color in front of you, your culture, in the name of which you perform your magnificent scientific feats: her vaunted superiority turns out to be imaginary.

Having settled on the shore of Astrolabe Bay, Maclay won the respect and friendship of the natives within a few months. It was not spears that greeted him now in the coastal and mountain villages, but joyful smiles. The women stopped hiding when he approached: they had known him for a long time and were not afraid of him. Everyone was in a hurry to seat their dear guest - during the day in the shade of a palm tree or under a canopy, and in the evening by the fire - to treat him to wild pig meat, make him comfortable for the night, and give him cool coconut milk to drink. If in the evening he was in a hurry home to Garagasi, young people with torches escorted him through the forest. Maclay's hut was visited every day by Papuans from villages near and far: everyone wanted to look at wise man, who knows how to heal the most severe wounds, light a fire, and grow unprecedented plants. The Papuans brought him gifts of fish, coconuts, bananas; Maclay generously provided them with nails, plant seeds, knives... Soon the dark-skinned people completely ceased to be afraid of their new friend, and he could freely attend their hunts and festivals, write down the words of their dialects, cut hair for microscopic examination hair on their heads. With courage, patience and justice, Miklouho-Maclay achieved the happy opportunity to work unhindered for the benefit of science, and his daily work brought rich fruits.

Scientists gleaned information from Miklouho-Maclay’s notes about the climate of New Guinea, its animals and flora; we learned that chains of mountains stretch along the coast, interrupted in the southwest by lowlands, that the average temperature in Astrolabe Bay is +26°; that the rainiest period there lasts from November to May; that the vegetation is close to Indo-Malayan with a small admixture of Australian forms; that the fauna is poor in mammals. And, most importantly, by describing the physical type of the Papuans of New Guinea, Miklouho-Maclay refuted the opinion widespread in science of that time that the Papuans had some special properties - the properties of “lower” races. It was common to think that Papuans’ hair grows in a special way, in “bundles.” “No, they grow exactly like the Europeans,” Miklouho-Maclay stated after lengthy work. Scientists claimed that the Papuans’ skin was also special: tough. "No; the skin is smooth and no different from the skin of Europeans,” concluded Miklouho-Maclay. And not individual entries, but the entire diary is a refutation of the slander leveled against dark-skinned tribes.

From Miklouho-Maclay’s diary the reader will inevitably draw the conclusion: they are not at all “bloodthirsty” or “insidious”, but people are the same as everywhere else. Miklouho-Maclay’s diary served and continues to serve the cause of exposing the theories of “polygenists” covering up the predation of the imperialist powers; served and still serves the cause of exposing racist theories created for the needs of fascism.

On July 21, 1872, a message appeared in the Kronstadt Bulletin newspaper, which soon spread throughout the world. Russian, Dutch, and Australian newspapers reported that Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay, who landed in Astrolabe Bay in September 1871, died. Some suggested that he was killed and eaten by savages, others that he was brought to his grave by a malignant tropical fever.

The Russian Geographical Society began to persistently work to ensure that a ship was immediately sent to the shores of New Guinea to search for Miklouho-Maclay.

The government sent the steam clipper Emerald to search for the scientist. On December 19, 1872, after a difficult passage through unknown waters, the clipper approached the northeastern coast of New Guinea.

To the surprise and joy of the Russian sailors, it turned out that the traveler was unharmed and not only did not need protection from the Papuans, but these “wild” people sincerely revere him and would like to never part with him. Miklouho-Maclay himself is so passionate about his research that, despite the illness debilitating him, he hesitates: should he leave on the Emerald or remain among the Papuans and continue his work? However, the scientific program drawn up by Maclay required his departure.

“It seemed necessary to me,” he wrote, “firstly, to get acquainted with the Papuans of other parts of New Guinea in order to compare them with the studied inhabitants of the Maclay Coast, secondly, to compare the Papuans of New Guinea with the inhabitants of other islands of Melanesia, and thirdly, to find out the attitude Papuans to the Negritos of the Philippine Islands, prove the presence or absence of a curly-haired race on the Malay Peninsula, and in the event that curly-haired tribes are actually found there, compare their representatives with the rest of the Melanesians.”

On December 21, 1872, Miklouho-Maclay boarded the Emerald. The natives Gorendu, Bongu, Gumbu, seeing off their friend, again and again demanded that he promise to return to them, and he repeated: “I will return.” When the clipper began to move forward, Maclay heard from the shore the sounds of the native drum - “baruma”, which had so many times reached his hut from Papuan villages on days of celebrations and sorrows... Now the Papuans sent him their farewell greetings.

Miklouho-Maclay began to implement the planned program already during the voyage on the Izumrud. The clipper headed to Hong Kong, stopping along the way in the Moluccas and Philippine Islands. In Manila, on the island of Luzon, the clipper was supposed to stay for five days, and Miklouho-Maclay took advantage of these days to visit the camp of the primitive inhabitants of the island - the “little blacks” - the Negritos. Can we consider that Negritos are the same as Papuans by race? - this is the question posed to Miklouho-Maclay by Academician Baer, ​​to which the young scientist tried to answer.

After crossing the wide Manila Bay on a native fishing boat, the traveler and his guide went to the mountains and soon came across a “portable village” of nomads. They lived in huts made of palm leaves; in these light dwellings you can lie or sit, but you cannot stand up and straighten up. The Negritos received the traveler very cordially and in a quarter of an hour they built the same hut for him - in essence, just a portable screen of leaves that protects him from the wind and cold.

“The first glance at the Negritos was enough for me,” Miklouho-Maclay wrote to Academician Baer, ​​“to recognize them as one tribe with the Papuans, whom I saw on the Pacific Islands and with whom I lived for fifteen months in New Guinea.” The traveler found the skulls of the Negritos, sketched the most characteristic faces and carefully wrote down the customs that he managed to find out about.

After a short rest in the mountain town of Beitenzorg, where Maclay wrote several scientific articles about the Papuans, in February 1874 he set off on a Malayan boat with a crew of sixteen people to new way: explore Papua Kowiai - the southwestern coast of New Guinea, subject to the Netherlands and famous, according to the Dutch, for “robbery and cannibalism.”

“The main purpose of my trip,” he writes, “was to get a clear idea of ​​the anthropological characteristics of the population of the southwestern coast of New Guinea in comparison with the inhabitants of its northeastern coast.”

Miklouho-Maclay achieved his goal this time too, but on the way he encountered many dangers.

He settled on a cape called Quince and began anthropological research. The Papuans greeted the traveler very warmly, quickly realized that he was a reliable friend for them, and built several huts near his house. But when he went on one of his excursions into the interior of the country, disaster struck. A small settlement in Quince was attacked by mountain Papuans, who had long been at odds with the coastal ones. They rushed at the sleeping people, sparing neither women nor children. The inhabitants of Mavara and Namatote - two nearby islands - took advantage of the attack of the mountaineers and plundered the scientist's hut completely.

Miklouho-Maclay chose the island of Aidum as his new location and continued his research. However, he did not forget the incident in Quince and was determined to punish the perpetrators of the murder and robbery. Having learned that one of the main instigators of the massacre, the captain (captain - chief, assistant radya) of the island of Mavara, was hiding on a pirogue, moored to the shore of the island of Aidum, Miklouho-Maclay, accompanied by a servant and one Papuan loyal to him, went ashore.

“I tore off the mat that served as the roof of the pirogue. The captain was actually sitting there.

- Salamat, tuan! (Hello, sir!) - he said in a weak voice. This man was twice or three times stronger than me, and now his whole body was trembling.

I grabbed the captain by the throat, putting the revolver to his mouth, and ordered Moiberit (the native) to tie his hands. After that I turned to the Papuans and said:

“I left this man in Quince to guard my hut, and he allowed women and children to be killed in my rooms.” I must punish this man."

But Miklouho-Maclay was too keen and impartial an observer to, having punished the random culprit of robbery and murder, overlook and not notice the true cause of the civil strife that tormented the natives of the shores of Papua Koviai. He knew that they had once led a peaceful, sedentary life, that they, like the Papuans of the Maclay Coast, had once had huts, coconut trees, and plantations. Why are they now living from hand to mouth, abandoning their settlements, wandering on the water from shore to shore; why, whenever you ask a Papuan: “Where are you from?”, he invariably answers: “I was looking for something to eat.” The real reason for the impoverishment of the natives was that the Malay merchants took the natives into slavery; the merchants taught the mountain Papuans to steal the coastal ones, and the coastal ones to take the mountain people captive, and bought the stolen people for next to nothing. By the time Miklouho-Maclay visited this coast, overt human trafficking had already been prohibited by the Dutch government, but the secret one continued undisturbed. This was the reason for the constant civil strife, massacres and famine.

Having seen firsthand the existence of “outrageous human trafficking,” which the Dutch authorities turned a blind eye to, Miklouho-Maclay did not consider it possible to remain silent. Here for the first time he acted as a defender of the oppressed peoples. In the summer of 1874, he sent a letter to the Governor-General of the Netherlands Indies, in which he demanded to stop the theft of people.

“Lawlessness flourishes unchecked,” he wrote bitterly in this letter. “It would be a great satisfaction for me if these few lines could contribute to at least some relief from the sad fate of the natives.”

Returning from the shores of Papua Koviai to the island of Java, the traveler soon fell seriously ill. He was on the verge of death. But, having recovered a little, he undertook the next journey necessary to fulfill the plan that he had outlined for himself. The Papuans of New Guinea in the east and west had already been studied by him in many respects, as well as the Negritos of the Philippine Islands. In December 1874, he decided to resolve the following question, not resolved by science: are there remnants of a Melanesian tribe on the Malay Peninsula, as some scientists claim, or are there no Melanesians there, as others claim? At the cost of a most difficult journey from one end of the Malacca Peninsula to the other - a journey that had to be done either walking waist-deep in water, then wading through impenetrable thickets, returning empty-handed to Johor and again setting off on a flat-bottomed boat, on the back of an elephant, or simply walking through the jungle infested with tigers, Maclay met those he was looking for.

“...At the headwaters of the Pahan River,” he subsequently reported to the Geographical Society, “in the mountains between the countries of Pahan, Tringano, Kelantan, I met the first purebred Melanesians.”

This tribe was called “Oran-Sakai”.

“Although they turned out to be very shy, I managed to take several portraits and anthropological measurements and visited almost all of their villages.”

Oran-Sakai is a nomadic tribe, a “dwarf” tribe, like the Negritos; the height of these people does not exceed one hundred and fifty centimeters. They have dark brown skin and black curly hair. They wandered through the forests, changing their campsites almost every day. They didn't build roads - they didn't need them. The sakai also had no need for the hatchets that the Malays used to cut branches.

“He bends with his hand, without breaking, young trees and bends or crawls under large ones. He never breaks off or cuts off a vine hanging in his path, but crawls under it. Despite the endless zigzags, twists, and detours, he moves forward amazingly quickly.”

Having reached the Patani River, having made a twenty-day journey on elephants through the lands of the Siamese king, Miklouho-Maclay at the end of 1875 returned to Singapore, and from there to Beitenzorg, and soon scientific articles appeared in European journals, where for the first time an ethnographic and anthropological description of the endangered tribes was given Malay Peninsula.

But Maclay did not make public all the material he had collected about the everyday and social way of life of the peoples inhabiting the peninsula. He knew that England was already extending its tentacles to the Malay Peninsula. In one of his letters addressed to the Russian Geographical Society, Maclay explained his reticence: “The Malays who trusted me would have every right to call such an act espionage ... so do not expect to find in my messages anything relating to the current “status quo” - social or political - the Malacca Peninsula...".

The time has come to fulfill the promise given to the Papuans of the villages of Gorendu, Gumbu, Bongu, and again settle on the shores of Astrolabe Bay. In February 1876, Miklouho-Maclay set off on board the trading schooner Seabird.

On the way to New Guinea, the schooner traveled around the islands of Celebes, Pelau, Admiralty, and Agomes. The traveler went ashore everywhere, without parting with his notebook, camera-lucida and measuring instruments. And everywhere his gaze found something new, something no one had noticed before. On the island of Andra, he compiled a dictionary of Papuan words unknown to any linguist in the world, and on the island of Vuan he discovered unprecedented Papuan money: each coin was the size of a millstone.

But no matter how valuable or valuable these discoveries were for science, they could not protect the scientist from dark thoughts about the danger threatening his New Guinea friends. In pursuit of sea cucumber (sea cucumber is a worm-like sea animal (holothuria). Sea cucumber is found near the islands of the Pacific Ocean. When smoked in a special way, it is used for food), turtle, and pearls, English, American, Dutch, and German merchants were not shy about anything. They constantly deceived the natives, selling them all sorts of junk at outrageously high prices, getting them drunk, and forcibly taking away the women; and if the natives resisted or even peacefully refused to engage in unprofitable bargaining, the armed traders simply took from them everything they wanted. Military ships sent by the colonial authorities always took the side of the traders and brutally dealt with the islanders.

This is what Maclay was thinking as he approached the familiar shore in June 1876.

“The natives were very happy, but not at all surprised by my arrival,” he writes in his diary, “they were sure that I would keep my word...”

Five days later, Miklouho-Maclay’s new house - this time on a promontory near the village of Bongu - was built with the help of the Papuans. The scientist continued his work.

The diary of the “second stay” is replete, like the first, with numerous precious information about the climate of New Guinea, its mountains, bays, flora and fauna. On August 12, Miklouho-Maclay took an excursion to one of the highest peaks of Mount Tayo and, at the risk of his life, falling off a steep and slippery slope, measured its height; On December 5, in the village of Bongu, he observed the festive dances of the natives; in March, he described in detail the wedding rites in Gorendu, attending the wedding of Mukau and Lo... Each of these records is a rich contribution to ethnography and geography.

“Thanks to the great trust the natives had in me,” Miklouho-Maclay subsequently reported to the Geographical Society based on his diary entries, “during my second stay with them I had the opportunity to become acquainted with very interesting customs: marriage, funeral, etc. I will point out some customs as examples . Thus, the natives leave the dead to rot in huts. When a person dies, his body is brought into a sitting position; then the corpse is woven with coconut palm leaves in the form of a basket, near which the wife of the deceased must maintain a fire for two or three weeks, until the corpse is completely decomposed and dry. Corpses are buried in the ground very rarely, and this happens only when some old man outlives all his wives and children, so there is no one to keep the fire going...”

But the most significant thing in the diary of the “second stay” are those pages that are dedicated to Maclay’s new feat: the fight against senseless wars between native tribes. “These wars have more the character of murder than the character of war or combat in open field, wrote Miklouho-Maclay. “Every murder leads to revenge, and thus the whole war consists of a series of vendettas.” Wars cause terrible harm to the entire population; the natives are afraid to leave their villages even for a few hours.”

Maclay intervened in the feud between the two tribes and forced both sides to lay down their arms.

By this time, Maclay's authority, which had stood high until then, had reached unprecedented heights. This was caused by the following incident. While dining one day with the old man Koda-Boro in the village of Bogati, Maclay accidentally learned that two young men from the village of Gorima, named Abui and Malu, were going to kill him and profit from his things.

“Maclay, don’t go to Gorima,” persuaded the scientist Kody-Boro... But Maclay the very next day, accompanied by a native translator (he had not yet learned the dialect spoken in this village), went straight there.

“A crowd of people gathered at the entrance to Buambramra, convened by my translator... My first words addressed to the translator were: “Abui and Malu are here or not?”

...When I mentioned these two names, the natives began to look at each other, and only after a few seconds I received the answer that Abui was here.

“Call Mala!” - was my order.

Someone ran after him.

When Malu appeared, I stood up and showed Abui and Malu two places near the fire, just opposite me. They came up with visible reluctance and sat down in the places I indicated. Then I made a short speech to the translator, who translated as I spoke, that is, almost word for word. The content of the speech was approximately as follows:

“Having heard yesterday from the Bogati people that two of Gorima’s people - Abui and Malu - want to kill me, I came to Gorima to look at these people. (When I began to look at both of them in turn, they turned away every time they met my gaze.) That this is very bad, since I did nothing to either Abui, or Malu, or any of the people of Gorima, that now, having walked from Bogati to Gorima, I am very tired and want to sleep, that I will go to bed now and that if Abui and Malu want to kill me, then let them kill me while I sleep, since tomorrow I will leave Gorima.

Having finished my last words, I headed towards the barla and, climbing onto it, wrapped myself in a blanket. My words seemed to have a strong effect. At least, while falling asleep, I heard exclamations and conversations in which my name was repeated more than once. Although I slept poorly and woke up several times, this was not due to fear of the natives, but probably due to the heavy dinner, which I usually avoid.

The next morning I was, of course, safe and sound. Before leaving Gorima, Abui brought me a gift of a respectable-sized pig and, together with Malu, certainly wanted to accompany me not only to Bogati, but also to Tal Maklay.”

This episode, which once again confirmed Maclay's fearlessness and his complete confidence in the sense of justice of dark-skinned people, turned their friendship for him into enthusiastic reverence. And Maclay took advantage of the new victory in his own way. He used it to reconcile the two tribes, to stop the internecine strife generated by empty superstition.

“Feuds among the Papuans,” explains Miklouho-Maclay in one of his scientific articles, “are often caused by the belief that death, even accidental, occurs through the so-called “onim” (the Papuans believed in the possibility of “lime” a person using magical spells “Onim” is one of the attributes of such witchcraft), made by the enemies of the deceased... After the death of a native, the relatives and friends of the deceased gather and discuss in which village and by whom the “onim” was prepared... They interpret for a long time, going through all the enemies of the deceased, without forgetting and their personal enemies. Finally, the village where the enemy lives is open; the perpetrators of the death have been found, a campaign plan is drawn up, allies are sought, etc. etc.”

It so happened that in the village of Gorendu, within a few days, two brothers suddenly died in one family: the young man Wangum, from an unknown cause, and the boy Tui, from a snake bite. The inhabitants of Gorendu were firmly convinced that the Papuans from the mountain villages had prepared “onim” and destroyed Wanguma and Tui. War seemed inevitable.

Both old people and children talked about her; the youth were putting their weapons in order. But then Maclay intervened.

“I decided to ban war,” he writes.

And he banned it. “There will be no war,” he declared to the Papuans.

After a few days, talk about war stopped, and military preparations stopped. Reluctantly, with bewilderment, the natives were forced to lay down their arms. Before what? Before a firm word a man they respected.

The diary of the “second stay” ends with a description of another significant episode. The fact that Maclay went to Gorima without being afraid of the threats of Abui and Malu, that he did not hesitate to stand between two tribes ready to rush at each other, instilled suspicion in the natives.

Not knowing how to explain to themselves the fearlessness that this thin man with a pale, tired face and quiet voice constantly showed, they finally suspected that he was immortal - and therefore was not afraid of their spears and arrows.

- Tell me, Maclay, can you die? - they asked him one day.

Maclay thought for a minute. Then he took a spear “thick and well-sharpened,” as he reports with pedantic precision in his diary, “heavy and sharp, which can cause inevitable death,” handed it to the Papuan, walked away a few steps and stopped opposite him.

"I took off my hat, wide margins with which they covered my face; I wanted the natives to be able to see from the expression on my face that Maclay was not joking and would not blink, no matter what happened,” he writes.

He handed the native a spear and said:

"See if Maclay can die."

Maclay was right that he was not afraid of the spear: the Papuans deeply and devotedly loved him and themselves refused the proposed experience.

“Aren, aren (no, no!),” Saul shouted when Maclay put a spear in his hand. He did not raise a weapon against Maclay.

“Many rushed towards me, as if wanting to shield me with their bodies,” Maclay continues in his diary. “After standing in front of Saul for some more time and even calling him a woman in a joking tone, I again sat down between the natives, who all started talking at once.

The answer was satisfactory; After this incident, no one asked me if I could die.”

On November 6, 1877, the English schooner Flower of Arrow accidentally entered Astrolabe Bay on its way to Singapore. Considering the work he had undertaken to survey all varieties of the Melanesian tribe far from complete, Miklouha-Maclay decided to leave his New Guinea friends for a while. Having secured the consent of the skipper, he transferred the things aboard the Flower of Arrow.

But before leaving, Maclay decided to warn the Papuans about the danger threatening them from the slave traders. He invited two people from each village: the oldest and the youngest.

“I explained to them that, probably, other people, the same white as me, with the same hair, in the same clothes, would arrive to them on the same ships on which I came, but it was very likely that they would be other people than Maclay... These people can take them into captivity... I advised them never to go out to meet the whites armed and never even try to kill the aliens, explaining to them the full power of firearms in comparison with their arrows and spears. I advised them to immediately send their women and children to the mountains to prevent trouble when a ship appears.”

The traveler spent about two years of his life trying to overcome the natives’ fear of the unprecedented, mysterious “white man” and win their trust. With hard work and great patience, he achieved this goal, but, having thoroughly studied the morals of the English, American, German, Dutch colonialists, whom the Papuans were inevitably going to see, he was forced to destroy what he had done: again instill in the natives fear of the “whites” and distrust of them. Maclay made his warnings not without bitterness, but he did not want to allow traders and industrialists to take advantage of the fruits of his selfless labors to the detriment of the natives.

Miklouho-Maclay later became convinced that the natives remembered his order word for word and carried out everything exactly.

In January 1878, Maclay arrived in Singapore. Here he became seriously ill. The doctors demanded that he go to rest and receive treatment, “otherwise,” they threatened, “the traveler will be forced to travel to the next world.” Reluctantly, Miklouho-Maclay moved to Sydney. In Sydney, he continued his work on the study of the brains of cartilaginous fish, which he had begun in his youth, and made anthropological observations of the natives who came to the hospital from the islands of Oceania.

His work was interrupted by disturbing news. A rumor spread that the Commonwealth of Australia was planning to seize the eastern coast of New Guinea. What Miklouho-Maclay feared every day seemed about to happen. He could not remain indifferent to this event. The Papuans of Astrolabe Bay were not some general, abstract concept for him; these were people: Tui and Digu, Kody-Boro, Mote.

He immediately sent a protest to "Her Britannic Majesty's High Commissioner" - Sir Arthur Gordon.

“...I have decided to raise my voice in the name of human rights...and to call your attention to the danger that threatens to destroy forever the welfare of thousands of people who have committed no other crime than belonging to a race other than ours and their weakness.”

He calls on the “high commissioner”:

“...to prevent a number of unjust murders, to save civilization in the future from the shame of beating women and children under the pretext of “deserved retribution.”

Did Miklouho-Maclay believe that the “high commissioner” would protect the natives? Apparently not very much. It was impossible to erase from memory “... the final destruction of the natives of Tasmania and the gradual extermination of the Australians, which continues to this day.” “The extermination of the dark races,” he wrote in November 1877, “is nothing other than the use of brute force, and every honest man should condemn it, or, if he can, rebel against its abuse.”

He not only condemned, but also rebelled. Here his duty as a scientist met with his public duty truly cultured person. There was no contradiction for him in fulfilling these two duties - social and scientific. They matched. By studying, he both enlightened and defended. He did not consider himself a person of a “superior race” on the grounds that he had White skin and that he knows how to shoot a gun; but he considered himself a man of advanced culture and became a defender of the Papuans of the Maclay Coast and all “colored” peoples enslaved by white colonialists. Every time on his way he encountered violence against the natives by the colonial powers, he turned to the authorities with words of reproach and anger. In the name of "justice" and "humanity" he demanded the creation of an international association to protect the human rights of the natives of the Pacific "from shameless robbery", demanded that energetic measures be taken to protect the rights of the natives to their land, to their forests and rivers; that the import of alcoholic beverages and the import of weapons be prohibited; in numerous appeals to senior Dutch and English officials, he demanded an end to the slave trade, practiced on the Pacific Islands under the guise of “free hiring” work force", human theft, robbery and deception. Even if Miklouho-Maclay’s appeals were naive, one should not expect help from officials of the colonial powers! - but he did everything he knew how and could.

In March 1879, Miklouho-Maclay, aboard the American schooner Sadie F. Keller, undertook a new voyage to the Pacific Islands. The schooner went to the New Hebrides, Agomes, Admiralty and Solomon islands to catch sea cucumbers and buy pearls. Miklouho-Maclay wanted to get acquainted with the possible a large number varieties of the Melanesian tribe and, in addition, hoped to visit the Maclay Coast again; the skipper promised to take him there. It is necessary “to keep the word given to friends, especially when they are in imminent danger of a collision with their future irreconcilable enemies,” Maclay wrote to his mother.

This journey turned out to be one of the most significant. During this trip, reality wished to give Miklouho-Maclay another objective lesson: this time not from the history of the development of primitive peoples, but from the history of the class struggle. Among Miklouho-Maclay’s notes dedicated to this journey, there is this:

“From Sydney I went to the islands of Melanesia. The journey lasted more than a year and was highest degree interesting. The schooner went first to Noumea and then to the South Bay of New Caledonia; I examined everything that was interesting in Noumea itself and in its environs.” “Everything that was interesting”... Of course, the native tribes of New Caledonia were interesting for Miklouho-Maclay. But, apparently, they are not the only ones.

Noumea, surroundings of Noumea: Nuu Island, Ducos Peninsula. Terrible names, terrible memories. In 1879, when Miklouho-Maclay came there, the heroes of the Paris Commune were still languishing in convict prisons and camps.

The islands and peninsulas of Nu, Ducos, Pen, turned by France into a place of exile for criminal and political criminals, were chosen as penal servitude very successfully. Neither the ocean, glowing at night with a phosphorescent sheen, nor the huge, low-burning stars of the Southern Cross, nor the lunar rainbows that appear over the ocean on humid nights, nor the bright greenery covering the coastal strip - nothing could brighten up the gloom of New Caledonian nature. In New Caledonia there is little land suitable for agriculture; Almost every summer it is visited by drought, miserable vegetable gardens perish from the heat and locusts, and livestock imported from Australia from lack of water. The nature of the ominous islands seemed to be at one with the jailers: sharks guarded the convicts in the ocean; mosquitoes tormented them at night, and during the day they were overwhelmed by ants, large and insatiable, capable of eating a person alive. Red bats with clawed, cartilaginous wings nested among the beams of the barracks.

The regime created on the islands was terrible... “The stocks, the seven-tailed whip and torture with pins - don’t we have something to be proud of? - wrote the typesetter Alleman, a communard exiled to the island of Nu. “And this is allowed in the most brilliant country on the globe, which we with stupid pride call civilized, advanced!”

New Caledonia is inhabited by Melanesian tribes - "Kanakas" - as the French called them. The jailers made sure that the people entrusted to their protection did not meet with sympathy among the native tribes. The missionaries, who openly traded vodka and secretly sold slaves, skillfully convinced the Kanakas that the convicts - all without exception - were cannibals, murderers, and if any of the prisoners managed to escape from the camp, the Kanakas, excellent hunters, at the sign of the prison authorities, rushed to search for them and organized a real raid, killed the unfortunate man and triumphantly brought the corpse of the fugitive tied to a stick to the governor of Noumea - in exactly the same way as the natives of Astrolabe Bay brought dead boars to their villages after a successful hunt.

One April day in 1879, first the Ducos Peninsula, then the island of Nu, and between them, on the bluish hills, the houses and forts of Noumea slowly opened up before Maclay’s eyes. The schooner "Sadie F. Keller" dropped anchor in the port.

Miklouho-Maclay went ashore. Noumea is the residence of the governor, the administrative center of hard labor. One-story plank wooden houses. Stone barracks. The stone, barracks-like palace of the governor, the cannons of military forts turned into a prison.

What does the phrase in his diary mean: “I examined everything that was interesting in Noumea and its environs”?

Did he see only the natives or did he manage to talk to the exiles? Did he meet Louise Michel - poet, ethnographer, historian, famous Communard, who defended Paris and the Commune with arms in hand?

Maclay's articles and diaries do not give us an answer to this question. Researchers have only indirect, but irrefutable evidence that the formidable and valiant fate of the Communards, whom Maclay inevitably had to meet in New Caledonia, touched and amazed him.

A letter from I. S. Turgenev to the Russian political emigrant, a member of one of the sections of the Commune, Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov, has been preserved. In this letter (dated December 27, 1882), the famous writer asked Lavrov to deliver to Miklouho-Maclay a pamphlet or pamphlets “written by former communards exiled to New Caledonia about their life there and the suffering they endured there.”

Turgenev addressed Lavrov at the personal and urgent request of the traveler himself...

Did Lavrov fulfill Turgenev’s request, did he obtain for Maclay the memories of the Communards amnestied in the early eighties? Be that as it may, the scientist’s interest in the prisoners of New Caledonia, judging by Turgenev’s note, was deep and stable - otherwise he would not have looked for their memoirs. And if so, it is natural for us to assume that this interest was caused by personal communication, that, having visited New Caledonia in 1879, Maclay could not help but see French exiles, that on the Ducos Peninsula Maclay talked with Louise Michel, and she told him about the Kanak uprising against the conquerors, said that among them there were true friends of the exiles; It is natural to assume that she sang their songs to Maclay, showed them drawings, that together they rejoiced at how smart, receptive and musical the Kanak children were...

If Miklouho-Maclay later became acquainted with the memoirs of Louise Michel, how close the final pages of the chapter in which Louise Michel, amnestied in 1880, described her departure from Noumea must have sounded to him!

“... when I was about to board the ship... I saw that the entire coast was covered with Kanakas... Not expecting an amnesty so soon, I wanted to set up a school in the native villages; now my black friends have come to remind me of my promise. “You won’t come again!” - they repeated bitterly. To console them, I told them with complete faith in my words: “I will return to you!”

For a long time afterwards, from my ship, I looked at the black crowd of Kanaks until they disappeared from sight. They cried, and I cried too.”

Don’t these farewells, described by the famous communar, remind us of others - those described by Miklouho-Maclay, talking about his first departure from Astrolabe Bay?

A new trip to Astrolabe Bay was postponed until a more convenient opportunity. Having seen how Captain Webber and his assistants sold all sorts of rubbish to the natives in exchange for sea cucumber and mother-of-pearl, Miklouho-Maclay decided that it would be better not to go to Astrolabe Bay himself than to bring such guests with him. Reluctantly, the scientist released the skipper from his obligation.

Having traveled around the New Hebrides, Admiralty, Banks, Agomes and Solomon Islands, Miklouho-Maclay visited the southern coast of New Guinea in search of a special yellow tribe, rumors of the existence of which were not confirmed; then he made an excursion into the interior of Australia and, finally, fulfilling his long-time dream, organized a zoological station in Sydney to study marine fauna.

In 1882, a great event occurred in the life of Miklouho-Maclay. After many years of absence, he visited his homeland again. In February, a Russian squadron arrived in Melbourne. Miklouho-Maclay left Melbourne on board the clipper Vestnik. Having reached Singapore, he moved to the cruiser Asia, and having reached Genoa, he moved to the battleship Peter the Great. In the second half of September, the scientist, after a twelve-year separation from his homeland, again saw the lighthouse of the Kronstadt port.

At the end of October, all Russian newspapers published a message that in the coming days in St. Petersburg, in the hall of the Geographical and then the Technical Society, Miklouho-Maclay would give reports on his travels.

October 29, 1882 arrived - the day of Miklouho-Maclay's first appearance before the Russian public. The Geographical Society hall was overcrowded. People stood in the aisles, stood in the adjacent room.

“Exactly at 8 o’clock in the evening,” reports the Petersburg Leaflet, “the vice-chairman of the society, P. P. Semenov, led our traveler on his arm. At his appearance, there was a deafening and long-lasting thunder of applause. N. N. Miklouho-Maclay, already adorned with gray hair, quickly entered the presidium table.

“Dear ladies and gentlemen! In eight days it will be 12 years since, in this same hall, I informed the gentlemen members of the Geographical Society about the program of proposed research on the Pacific Islands. Now, having returned, I can say that I have fulfilled the promise I made to the Geographical Society: to do everything in my power so that the enterprise does not remain without benefit for science.”

This is how Miklouho-Maclay began his report - a report-report, a report-report of a scientist to the highest geographical institution of Russia.

In deep silence, those gathered listened to the stories of Nikolai Nikolaevich. The names of the people Bongu, Gorendu, Gumbu, the names of trees, rivers and mountains of an unknown, distant country, the story of the dangers and hardships to which the traveler was exposed, and of his scientific victories sounded in the silence of the huge St. Petersburg hall. The next day, all newspapers published detailed reports about Miklouho-Maclay's lectures. The correspondents unanimously noted their deep attention to the quiet, devoid of all external effects, meaningful and modest speech of this pale, tired man.

“Everyone who listened to him understood,” wrote one journalist, “that he was telling only the truth, that he was telling only what he had seen himself, not passing on anything from other people’s words and constantly checking on the spot someone else’s observation known to him.”

Miklouho-Maclay received several greetings from students and scientific societies in Russia. When he arrived in Moscow and again gave his reports, the Society of Natural History Lovers awarded him a gold medal for his work on ethnography and anthropology.

However, not everyone was happy with the success of the brave scientist. Not everyone was happy with his defense of black people. On the sidelines, skeptics and ill-wishers shrugged their shoulders:

- For mercy's sake, what did he do? He brought some drawings and clay pots. So what? A half-educated student playing the role of a benefactor of the human race... Yes, he hardly lived with the savages - he spent most of his time in Sydney... And what is interesting about these savages?

“Although the observations of the scientific traveler concern the natives of New Guinea, the Malay Archipelago and Australia, on the general question of race they may have an instructive value for us,” wrote one astute journalist.

That is why the bureaucratic, reactionary circles of tsarist Russia were wary. That is why Tsar Alexander III, who promised to print the traveler’s diaries at his own expense, did not fulfill his promise. The Papuans are far away, but the downtrodden Chuvash, Mordovians, and Voguls are close, at hand.

At first it was only wariness, it was only a whisper about the dubiousness of scientific merits, later the whisper grew stronger and turned into loud slander.

...At the end of 1882, the scientist left Russia to continue his research. Chance helped him visit the Maclay Coast once again. When the ship delivered it to Batavia, it turned out that the corvette Skobelev was standing in the roadstead, loading coal. The corvette commander, Rear Admiral Kopytov, agreed to take the traveler to New Guinea, although this was not entirely on his route.

Miklouho-Maclay moved onto the ship. On the way, on one of the Moluccas islands, in Amboina, he bought goats and two zebu as a gift to his friends: a bull and a heifer.

On March 17, 1883, Miklouho-Maclay landed on his shore for the third time. He did not stay here long: only a few days. He distributed seeds to the natives and tried to teach them how to care for goats and zebu. The natives noisily rejoiced at the seeds and animals, asked Maclay where he would live and told him vying with each other how the “Tamo-Inglis”, the British, came here, but left without profiting from anything, because the people of Bongu, Bili-Bili, Gumbu behaved in exactly as Maclay advised them when leaving...

On the morning of March 23, “Skobelev” weighed anchor. On the eve of departure, the traveler wrote in his diary:

“Rising before dawn, I went to the bridge and made a sketch of the Mana-boro-boro mountains and the Satisfied People archipelago. A strong contrary wind prevented us from filming, and I went to a small island called Megaspena, covered with vegetation and in many places convenient for mooring boats. From there I moved to the island of Segou, found Cain and through him asked the natives who consider the island of Megaspen to be theirs if they would agree to give me this island in order to build a house there if I returned. Everyone not only agreed, but were very pleased to hear that I would settle not far from them.”

But Maclay no longer had to settle near them.

The last period of the great traveler's life has come. Rheumatism and malaria, the severe consequences of his dedicated labor in tropical countries, tormented him more and more.

He no longer traveled to the Admiralty Islands, Malacca, or New Guinea. Was he no longer able to move much and intensely, or did he feel that he did not have long to live, and was in a hurry to consolidate what he had done? Be that as it may, in the last years of his life he sought to process the extracted material, rather than extract new one.

Miklouho-Maclay no longer travels.

He got married, lives in Sydney and is actively putting his collections, diaries, notes, and drawings in order.

In 1884, Germany occupied the northeastern part of New Guinea. The Maclay coast, on which every piece of land was cultivated by the natives and trodden far and wide and explored by the tireless Russian traveler, became the prey of German imperialism. The Germans called the captured land "Emperor Wilhelm Land".

“The natives of the Maclay Coast are protesting against annexation to Germany,” Miklouho-Maclay telegraphed Bismarck on behalf of his clients.

In 1886, the scientist went to Russia again. He wanted to get the printing of his scientific works off the ground and make one last attempt to alleviate the lot of the Papuans.

Arriving in St. Petersburg, he began to propagate the idea of ​​​​creating a Russian colony on one of the Pacific Islands. It was not supposed to be a colony in the usual sense of the word - a goldmine for traders and industrialists who took the land from the natives, profiting from their forced labor under the protection of cannons and rifles; no, the colonists, according to Maclay’s thought, were supposed to settle only on free lands not occupied by natives and live from the fruits of the labor of their hands. With this project, Miklouho-Maclay addressed the tsar, the ministers and directly through the newspapers “to everyone who wants it.”

Those interested responded with hundreds of letters, but the tsar banned the colony. Miklouho-Maclay’s next appeal to the “those in power” - this time to the government of Tsarist Russia - ended the same as his previous appeals to the “High Commissioner” of the English possessions or to the governor of the Netherlands Indies ended - nothing. The colonial English and Dutch authorities and the government of tsarist Russia, naturally, could not act in the role that Maclay offered them - as defenders of the enslaved peoples.

Maclay's contemporaries perfectly grasped the social meaning of his scientific experience, the revolutionary current resounding in all his activities. It was not for nothing that a peasant from the Novgorod province, responding to Maclay’s call to take part in organizing the colony, wrote him a letter “about hell on earth” created by the rich for the poor; It was not for nothing that Tsar Alexander III “inscribed” on Maclay’s project: “refuse”, and the Black Hundred “New Time” mocked his scientific works... Both friends and enemies perfectly understood the significance of the experiment that had just been done by the scientist, and the hidden revolutionary meaning of this experience. For all his modesty, Miklouho-Maclay also understood this. This is what gave him the strength to treat attacks and slander with the same majestic calm with which he treated the spears flying in his face.

Miklouho-Maclay, as always, as throughout his glorious, difficult life, remained calm, no one heard any complaints from him, but his strength was declining. Of course, it was not the ridicule of corrupt hacks that embarrassed him. But the collapse of the dream of a fair labor colony on a distant Pacific island is what ultimately deprived him of his last strength. Miklouho-Maclay was not only getting old, he was, in the words of one contemporary, “decrepit.” It was hard to believe that he was not 60, but only 40 years old.

“He has lost a lot of weight, his characteristic face is covered with wrinkles...” writes a correspondent for a newspaper sympathetic to Maclay. “Only when he begins to talk about his shore and its inhabitants does his voice grow stronger and his eyes, sadly darting from object to object, suddenly come to life.”

In 1886, the scientist donated his collections to the Academy of Sciences. In 1887 he went to Sydney. He was in a hurry to bring his wife, children and all his papers home. Having settled in St. Petersburg, on Galernaya Street, he began to process his notes. Pulmonary edema suffocated him, rheumatism and neuralgia caused acute pain, but with an effort of will he tried to overcome the disease, as he had once overcome a fever while traveling through New Guinea and Malacca. He dictated and dictated for seven, eight hours a day. It was impossible to leave the drafts unsorted. Think it over and dictate everything to the end, to the last piece of paper - now this is the peak that must be taken at any cost. After all, he climbed mountains while sick, walked through swamps and rivers up to his chest...

But this time the disease overcame him.

“Yesterday at the Willie Clinic in St. Petersburg, at 8:30 pm, Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay died at the 42nd year of his life after a long and serious illness. Death found Nikolai Nikolaevich when he was processing the second volume of notes about his travels.”

“In the person of Nikolai Nikolaevich,” one of his learned colleagues said at the grave, “we are burying a man who glorified our fatherland in the most remote corners of the world.”

Miklouho-Maclay was forced to study abroad: he was expelled from St. Petersburg University and prohibited from enrolling in other universities in Russia. He spent only his childhood and youth in his homeland. For two decades, he visited Russia only on short visits. He finally moved to St. Petersburg only shortly before his death. For many years he maintained contact with his native country only by letters, and even then very rarely: regular mail did not go to where Miklouho-Maclay traveled by ship and on foot, on elephants and in pirogues.

But no matter how far from Russia he found himself, he brought with him everywhere the air of his native country, the air of the time when he left it.

He studied at St. Petersburg University in the early sixties. It was the time of revolutionary upsurge, peasant unrest, underground circles of the various intelligentsia, the time of unshakable faith in the power of natural sciences, the time of the poetry of Nekrasov and Shevchenko, the passionate sermon of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky in Sovremennik, Herzen in the Bell.

There is reason to believe that Miklouho-Maclay was expelled from the gymnasium for his disrespectful attitude towards his superiors, that at the university he took part in stormy student gatherings, and the police were involved in his expulsion: he spent three days in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

But that's not the point at all. All these facts do not yet give us the right to consider Miklouho-Maclay a revolutionary of the sixties. Who then did not participate in student gatherings, who was not guilty of disrespectful attitude towards the authorities?!

Miklouho-Maclay’s connection with the advanced ideas of the sixties is much less noticeable, but deep and strong. It lies not on the surface, but at the very basis of the social and scientific cause to which he gave his life.

“Among the prejudices...” wrote the leader of the revolutionary democracy of the sixties, Chernyshevsky, “a very prominent place is occupied by the prejudice that one people, by its very innate nature, by its race, is incapable of what another, also by its race, is capable of.”

“In the formation of the current situation of each people, such a huge part belongs to the action of circumstances independent of natural tribal qualities that these... qualities themselves, if they exist, then there is very little room left for their action - immeasurably, microscopically little space.”

“Don’t slander!” - this excerpt ends with this exclamation.

How did Miklouho-Maclay feel about Chernyshevsky? Did Chernyshevsky know anything about Miklukh-Maclay? This question has not been sufficiently studied (one can only point out that in one of the Moscow museums there is a drawing made by Maclay’s hand, in which Chernyshevsky is depicted), but, be that as it may, there is not a single line in Maclay’s diary that would contradict the quoted thoughts of Chernyshevsky .

When you read the project for creating a Russian colony in the Pacific Ocean, put forward by Maclay to protect the Papuans, Chernyshevsky also involuntarily comes to mind.

“The colony constitutes a community and is governed by an elder, a council and general meeting settlers,” wrote Miklouho-Maclay. "Every year all net profit from cultivating the land will be divided among all participants in the enterprise in proportion to their position and work.”

Is it not the kind of labor communities that Vera Pavlovna, the famous heroine of Chernyshevsky’s novel “What is to be done?”, dreamed of. And when you read in Maclay’s diary how he treated and taught the Papuans, doesn’t it involuntarily come to mind the Russian youth, who at the same time, leaving universities and living rooms, rushed to Russian villages to heal and teach the people?

…The natives never forgot Miklouho-Maclay’s constant, unchanging care for them: neither the trees he planted, nor the axes he gave, nor the medicines, nor the coconut oil that he taught them to extract from nuts.

The memory of the Russian traveler continued to live for many decades on the shores of Astrolabe Bay, along with the sprouts of new trees, along with a curly-haired dark-skinned girl, to whom he gave the Russian name Maria; and for a long time the steel ax was called there “Maclay’s axe” and the watermelon – “Maclay’s watermelon”. Already at the beginning of this century, on the island of Bili-Bili, ethnographers recorded a legend composed by the Papuans about Maclay:

“Maclay came and told our ancestors: stone axes are not sharp, they are blunt. Throw them into the forest, they are no good, stupid. Maclay gave them iron knives and iron axes...”

He lived on their island for a long time and in their language there is “banana Maclay”, and “pumpkin Maclay”, and “melon Maclay”.

The natives of Astrolabe Bay did not understand why Miklouho-Maclay collected skulls and hair, why he measured mountains, but Maclay’s nobility turned out to be completely understandable to them. They fully appreciated the qualities of this extraordinary man. When the traveler's legs hurt, the natives made a stretcher and, taking turns, carried him so that it would not hurt him to step; They created a saying about Maclay’s truthfulness: “Maclay’s word is one”; when he left, they took care of his things for years. And this was not an admiration for the material power of the white man, for his lamp, gun and matches. Ohlson, Maclay's servant, also knew how to shoot a gun and light matches, but Ohlson was a nonentity and a coward, and the Papuans did not value him at all. Love for Maclay was not caused by admiration for the power of unknown objects, but admiration for the strength and beauty of the human personality.

Lydia Chukovskaya