Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay: short biography. 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

"MAN FROM THE MOON" AND HIS EARTHLY WOMEN

HERO OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay. Famous Russian traveler, scientist, humanist. Many biographical books have been written about this man. Most of them belong to the section of children's literature. This is understandable: the life of the famous Russian traveler is full of adventure and exoticism. Well, what about “biographies for adults”? There are very few of them, and, moreover, they are clearly stingy with the facts of the traveler’s personal life. Maybe that's why everything we know about him comes from children's books. And this, you see, is too little.

However, even less is known about him abroad. One of the rare books about him was published not so long ago in Australia. It states that Miklouho-Maclay presented himself as a travel scientist only as a cover, but in reality he was... a well-covered spy, an agent of the tsarist government.

Who was Miklouho-Maclay really? What kind of person was this? And what did his “children’s” and “adult” biographers keep silent about?

Nikolai Nikolaevich showed himself to be a strange boy from childhood. Small in stature, frail and pale, he was incredibly active and energetic. For all his restlessness, he was silent, stubborn, daring and surprisingly brave. It seems that he was not at all afraid of pain: once, having argued with his friends at the gymnasium, he pierced his palm with a large sewing needle - and did not even groan. Among his classmates, who were taller and stronger, no one dared to offend him: despite his frail appearance, Nikolenka fought like crazy, sparing neither himself nor his opponent. He also gained boyish respect through his complete lack of disgust. A horse-drawn horse runs over a stray dog ​​- he’s right there: he’s already picking through the dog’s guts with a stick, trying to determine where the heart is, where the liver is, where the stomach is... He can easily put a frog or a large hairy caterpillar in his mouth. His school satchel is a real morgue for dead rats and crows.

His parents have only two problems with him: the boy eats almost nothing and often gets sick. At the table, just be careful not to slip your plate to one of the brothers. They will eat up everything you give, but try to please this one! I don’t want this, and I don’t want that, and in general, I dipped my spoon into the plate a couple of times - and that’s it: “I’ve already eaten!” And they showed him to the doctor - he prescribed some kind of bitter mixture - but he still doesn’t eat well, he’s just skin and bones!

Nikolai Nikolaevich will eat little and be sick a lot all his life. And endure pain just as steadfastly - almost always on your feet, working. How many times the most experienced and best doctors Having examined him, they found that the situation was hopeless. How often did he hear the recommendation to “put things in order” and “write a will.” But each time, in some incomprehensible way, he overcame his illness, got back on his feet and got back to work. “I have a very elastic nature...” he explained his recovery to the surprised doctors. Throughout his life, this man wrote about fifty wills.

After his death - Miklouho-Maclay lived only forty-two years - anatomists who opened the corpse of the deceased will be extremely puzzled. They won't find a single healthy organ! And the brain of the deceased will generally confuse them. For it will not be a brain, but some kind of terrible black mess - one continuous tumor...

What kind of force lifted from hospital bed this strange person suffering from several dozen ailments at the same time? We can say that this strength is incredible will and determination. “Whoever knows well what he must do will tame fate.” This ancient Indian saying served as Miklouho-Maclay’s life motto.

HARD WORKER

When there are no friends best comrades- books. It’s for the better: “reading is a conversation with the wise, and action is a clash with fools.” Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Schopenhauer are favorite authors and, at the same time, teachers. Principled, it should be noted, teachers. No sentimentality. So as a student, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay became just as uncompromising: self-willed, impudent, disobedient... And, as a result, such an entry in the “Case of a volunteer student of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics Nikolai Mikloukha”: “... be excluded without the right to enter other higher institutions of Russia".

Now it was possible to continue education only abroad. Having obtained a false certificate of lung disease through a doctor he knew, Maclay managed to obtain a foreign passport. The door to Europe was open.

Abroad, he will receive an excellent education and make his first trip - to Africa. This will come later, but for now, on the day of departure, he hides Chernyshevsky’s forbidden novel “What is to be done?” in the basket with his modest belongings. Soon this book will replace the Bible for him, and one of the heroes of the novel, Rakhmetov, will serve as the ideal that he will look up to.

Like Rakhmetov, from now on he will despise all chatter and other human “weaknesses” - love, home comfort, lovely family holidays. The meaning of his life will be concentrated in one word - benefit. Everything for the benefit of the fatherland and humanity, nothing for oneself. And even for relatives - it’s almost the same thing! His mother and his beloved sister Olga, both sick with tuberculosis and living very poorly, would turn their lives into a continuous collection of money for his travels. In response, Maclay will send them parcels... with his dirty laundry.

Dirty laundry is not at all an evil mockery or black ingratitude, but... a forced necessity. He was so busy working that he not only had no time, but also no place to wash his clothes. And there’s simply no reason to give it to the laundry! “Despised pennies,” as he liked to say, were needed for work, for the purchase of instruments, tools, drugs... Once in Constantinople, the Russian consul, having learned about the arrival in Turkey of Miklouha-Maclay, at that time a scientist-traveler already known throughout Europe , greeted him cordially and, in a fit of enthusiastic generosity, exclaimed: “Demand everything your soul desires!” Maclay thought for a second. “I would like to have my dirty laundry washed... at your expense,” he replied shyly. “I spent so much...” The Russian consul opened his mouth in surprise...

It can be said without exaggeration that Miklouho-Maclay was an obsessive workaholic. He worked not by the clock, but to the extreme stage of fatigue, to complete exhaustion. He was so exhausted that he fell asleep instantly, barely resting his head on the pillow.

Once he even managed to sleep through the famous Messina earthquake of 1869, and only the next morning he learned that most of the residents could not sleep a wink all night. Later, he recalled with a laugh how one evening, having come to the village of the Papuans, he, incredibly tired, lay down in the middle of the village and immediately fell asleep. He woke up from a strange sensation - the “ignoble” part of his back was very sore. Opening his eyes, he discovered that someone had severely stabbed his buttocks. Later the following became clear.

When he fell asleep, the frightened Papuans, coming closer to him, began shouting and hooting, wanting to scare the uninvited guest. But the guest did not react to the noise and threats. Because to kill a sleeping “moon-faced” man - who knows, maybe he is an evil sorcerer? - the Papuans did not dare, then, after a short meeting, they began to poke spears into his buttocks - the most, in their opinion, the safest place to live. And again the strange guest showed no reaction. They started poking harder - again no reaction. Maybe he died? And only when some daredevil tried to check this by thrusting a spear between the sleeping man’s teeth, Maclay suddenly muttered loudly, through half-asleep, something in an incomprehensible, “sorcerer’s” language. The Papuans, deciding that this was a terrible curse, threw down their spears and ran into the forest. And they didn’t bother him again until the morning, when he woke up.

“THONE WHO DOES NOT RISK ANYTHING WILL ACHIEVE NOTHING”

Probably not everyone can just lie down and sleep in the middle of angry cannibal savages. This, in addition to fatigue, also requires great courage. And Miklouho-Maclay, as we already know, was a man of rare courage and extraordinary courage. Indeed, “great heroes are always short,” as the Polish proverb notes.

Once in Germany, he dined in a small restaurant with his fellow student, Prince Alexander Meshchersky. Next to their table was large group German students. The local company was in a good state of drinking, and from there every now and then to varying degrees excitement could be heard: “Germany!.. Ah, Germany!.. Yes, Germany!..” Suddenly some huge student separated from her and, approaching Maclay, defiantly declared: “You, gentlemen, seem to have your own opinion? That's what I heard, anyway. Maybe you’ll dare to say it out loud and then we’ll... um... argue?” All eyes of the drunken crowd turned to the two Russians. “If you don’t mind,” Maclay answered calmly, “first I will express my opinion to you personally. Come closer. Even closer." The drunken big man bent down very low to the little Russian. Then he straightened up with dignity. “Are you satisfied with my explanation?” - asked the Russian student. “Y-yes... quite!” - said the big man and returned to his company.

“What did you whisper to him?” - the slightly pale Meshchersky asked curiously. - “I said: “Prince Meshchersky will be my second. I hit the ace in ten steps. We’ll only shoot from ten... But maybe you still prefer to return to the table alive?” As you can see, he chose to return to the table alive.”

While traveling around the Arabian Peninsula, he joined a crowd of pilgrims going to holy places on one of the ships. In order not to arouse suspicion, Maclay shaved his head, put on a Muslim turban and changed into an Arab robe. He had no idea that, having boarded this ship, he would find himself surrounded by the most ardent religious fanatics - members of the “sacred brotherhood of Kadir”. By the time he realized this, it was already too late. In addition, there was not a single European on the ship - so there was nowhere to wait for help. One of the pilgrims, a gray-bearded qadir in a white robe and with a huge turban on his head, walked around the strange pilgrim several times and suddenly shouted:

There is an infidel among us! We must throw him overboard! Overboard!

The Kadirs began to shout, jumped up from their seats and surrounded Maclay. The young qadir came close to him and, contrivingly, grabbed him by the neck. Fortunately, the Russian traveler did not lose his composure. He gently but decisively moved the Kadir's hand away, untied the bag and took out the microscope. The Kadirs recoiled: the sight of an unfamiliar object scared them seriously. Maclay did not waste time: waving a microscope, he drove the gray-bearded troublemaker into the hold and slammed the hatch. And then, turning to the angry crowd, he shouted in Arabic: “I am a doctor!” This phrase saved his life: doctors are especially respected by Muslims.

And only when he found himself on the shore, he explained to the hapless members of the “sacred brotherhood” the purpose of the microscope. The Kadirs laughed, clutching their stomachs. The gray-bearded qadir also smiled through his mustache...

“Whoever risks nothing will achieve nothing,” said Miklouho-Maclay. One day one of the Papuans asked him if he was mortal? Maclay handed him a spear and suggested checking it out. Madman? Great psychologist? Probably both. When the spear was already raised to be thrown, other Papuans stood around Maclay in a ring: you cannot kill God! And even if not God, then a true friend.

"TAMO BILEN"

Courage alone is clearly not enough to win the respect of the Papuans. It was necessary to show wisdom, justice, and, if necessary, strength. Coping with this task turned out to be quite easy. It was enough to shoot a bird with a gun, or set fire to a bowl of water, quietly adding alcohol to it. It is much more difficult to win the trust and love of the natives. “Before,” Maclay noted in his diary, “they only said “tamo rus,” a man from Russia, and “kaaram tamo,” a man from the moon. Now most often they say about me “tamo bilen” - a good person. Maybe “tamo bilen” is more important than “karam tamo”... In any case, being “tamo bilen” is more difficult than “kaaram tamo” or “tamo rus”... "

He, indeed, performed a miracle: while other Europeans, landing on the shores of New Guinea, sought only one level of communication: “we are your mirror and whiskey, you are gold and slaves to us,” Maclay studied the life of the Papuans from the inside, becoming them a true friend and protector. He treated them, gave them necessary advice, taught useful skills, resolved disputes and stopped wars. He brought with him and sowed seeds of useful plants - pumpkin, watermelon, beans, corn - into the soil of New Guinea. Fruit trees have taken root near his hut. Many Papuans themselves came to his garden to get seeds. For this and for many other things, Maclay was loved. He was invited as a guest of honor to christenings, weddings, funerals and other important events. Holidays were held in his honor and newborns were named.

All this did not come in vain. Late at night, under the light of a flickering lamp, he writes in his diary: “I’m becoming a little Papuan; this morning, for example, I felt hungry while walking and, seeing a large crab, caught it and ate it raw... In the morning I am a zoologist-naturalist, then, if people are sick, I am a cook, a doctor, a pharmacist, a painter and even a laundress... One in a word, a jack of all trades... In general, in my present life, that is, when I often have to be a woodcutter, a cook, a carpenter, and sometimes a laundress and a sailor, and not just a gentleman involved in the natural sciences, my hands have a lot to do Badly. Not only the skin on them has become rough, but even the hands themselves have grown, especially the right one... My hands were not particularly tender before, but now they are positively covered with calluses and burns...”

“Happiness,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “is pleasure without remorse.” Perhaps this difficult time, filled with dangers, labors and illnesses, was one of the happiest in the life of the Russian traveler. He achieved what he set out to achieve. He did good, and this good benefited everyone - both the people who surrounded him and the science he served.

When a ship came for him and he had to leave, all the Papuans came out to see Maclay off. From his hut to the very shore they ran after him and shouted:

Stay with us, Maclay! We will do whatever you tell us, just don’t leave! Don't leave us, brother! Stay with us!

Maclay's stern heart could not stand it and he burst into tears. For the first time I cried - in front of everyone! But now he no longer worried about what these people might think of him. About the “man from the moon” who cries like a mere mortal... Shaking hands with his friends, he told them:

I'll come back! Ballal Maklay hoodie! Maclay's word is one!

"DOCTOR! YOU ARE A SCAGAIN!”

Leaving the island, Maclay warned the Papuans:

Bad white people may come after me - they deceive, steal people and even kill. Listen to me and do as I say... If a ship appears at sea... send the women and children to the mountains. Hide your weapon. Go ashore without weapons. Because they have fire that kills, and your spears will not help...

What if Tamo Bilen, Maclay’s friend, arrives? - asked one of the Papuans.

Then this person will say two words: “Abadam Maclay” - “Brother of Maclay.” These will be our secret words...

A year later, the German naturalist, Dr. Otto Finsch, planning to visit New Guinea, met a Russian traveler in Sydney. Nikolai Nikolaevich, not knowing about the secret mission of his German colleague, himself gave him the password words. The Papuans, naturally, warmly welcomed the envoy of their white patron. And he hastened to remove the Russian flag from Maclay’s hut and hoisted the flag of his state on the coast. And then he announced the annexation of this territory by Germany.

Miklouho-Maclay's indignation knew no bounds. He sends a telegram to the German Chancellor Bismarck: “The natives of the Maclay Coast reject German annexation. Maclay." Another telegram is sent to Dr. Finsch: “Dr. Finsch, you are a scoundrel!” On the same day, Maclay writes a letter to Alexander III: “I ask that the natives of the Maclay coast be granted Russian protection, recognizing it as independent... in the name of philanthropy and justice, in order to resist the spread of human theft, slavery and the most unscrupulous exploitation of the natives on the Pacific islands... " There was no feedback from the named recipients.

Maclay did not calm down: he began to send articles and letters to all scientific journals and societies in Europe and America, exposing the predatory policies of the colonialists. He even planned to go to Berlin - perhaps he should invite “Herr” Finsch to a duel? - however, events developed too quickly. Less than a month had passed before Britain declared its protectorate over another part of the territory of New Guinea. Dreams of Papuan independence finally collapsed.

The only success: after his speeches in the world press, numerous letters and appeals to influential government and public figures in various countries, France and the Netherlands officially banned the slave trade in their colonies.

Abandoning his scientific studies and family, Maclay hurried to Russia. Having destroyed all obstacles, he made his way to Alexander III, who was vacationing in Livadia, and outlined to the tsar his plan for founding a Russian colony on the shores of Maclay or on one of the islands of the Pacific Ocean. “You are a diplomat, Miklukha,” said the king, after listening to the scientist. “But you can’t fool me with chaff... I’m not going to quarrel with Bismarck over some Papuans.”

Then Maclay decided on a last resort. He placed the following advertisement in several newspapers: “The famous traveler is gathering everyone who wants to settle on the Maclay Coast and on the islands of the Pacific Ocean...”

Was he planning to organize a commune in New Guinea? This is true. “Members of the commune,” he wrote in an article accompanying the announcement, “will begin to work the land together. Products will be distributed according to labor. Each family will build a separate house. You can only settle on lands not occupied by natives. Money is abolished... The colony will constitute a community with elected governing bodies: an elder, a council and a general meeting of settlers. Every year, all net profits from cultivating the land will be divided among all participants in the enterprise and in proportion to their position and work...” He prepared a detailed plan for the establishment of a “rational society”, where there will be no oppression of man by man, where everyone works and gets paid according to their work.

Imagine, this fantastic dream of a Russian traveler could well come true!

A STEP FROM YOUR DREAM

Something happened that even in his most ardent dreams he did not dare to hope for: Russia shook. Within three months, two thousand volunteers applied! Prominent journalists and public figures became interested in the project. Leo Tolstoy showed a keen interest in this idea and even expressed his readiness to become one of the future colonists. To deliver people to the site of the future colony, the Naval Ministry even allocated a large warship... However, at the very last moment, when it seemed that the expedition to the Pacific Islands was a final and decided matter, the tsarist government suddenly became alarmed.

On the initiative of the tsar, a committee of representatives of all government ministries met in October 1886 to discuss Miklouho-Maclay’s proposals. As might be expected, the committee unanimously opposed the project. Alexander III imposed a resolution: “Consider this matter finally over; Refuse Miklouho-Maclay!”

Immediately after this, several official newspapers published mocking notes addressed to the traveler. Even the completely independent “Dragonfly” and “Alarm Clock” published cartoons of him: Maclay, with his hands on his hips, stands with one leg on the back of a Papuan standing on all fours. Signature under the picture: “His Honor Miklouho-Maclay, the new Pacific landowner.” Once again the yellow newspapers surprised with their metamorphoses: from “Russian pride and glory” he instantly turned into a “native king” and “famous adventurer”. The conservative newspaper Novoye Vremya published a huge article about Maclay entitled “Scientific Quackery.” And a completely inexplicable thing: the Academy of Sciences refused to accept the gift - that is, for free! - extensive anthropological and ethnographic collections of Maclay. Collections that scientific institutes in Britain, Germany, France and other most developed countries peace!

It was difficult to resist such a stream of lies and dirt. “I have the impression that the Russian Academy seems to exist only for Germans!” - the scientist said in his hearts. There was some truth in this reproach: it was then that the great Russian scientist Dmitry Mendeleev was not elected as an academician...

The only thing that consoled him were the letters that came to him from all over Russia from his admirers. A letter from an unknown woman has survived:

“I can’t help but somehow express my deep respect for you and surprise as a person; not the kind of surprise that makes you run to see a new product, but the kind that makes you think why there are so few people who look like a person. Once again, please accept my deep respect and sympathy as a Russian. Russian".

Leo Tolstoy, trying to provide him with moral support in these dark days, wrote to him: “I am... touched and admired in your work by the fact that, as far as I know, you were the first, undoubtedly, to prove by experience that man is always man , i.e. a kind, sociable creature, with whom one can and should enter into communication only with goodness and truth, and not with guns and vodka. And you proved this with a feat of true courage. Your experience with wild (people) sets an era in the science that I serve - in the science of how people can live with each other...”

“EVERYONE WILL BE BORN WITH AN ASS FIT FOR THE THRONE”

Goethe, the German sage, philosopher and poet, wrote in his declining years: “National hatred is a strange thing. At the lower levels of education it manifests itself especially strongly and ardently. But there is a stage where it completely disappears and where you feel the happiness and sorrow of the neighboring people as well as your own. This level corresponds to my nature, and I settled on it long before I passed sixty...” Miklouho-Maclay gained a foothold at this level at the age of twenty-six.

The Russian scientist made an important discovery: those whom Darwin and other scientists called “wild” - the Papuans of New Guinea, the natives of Oceania, and the Australian aborigines - are the same “homo sapiens” as civilized peoples. Having carefully studied the biological and physiological properties of the brain of dark-skinned people, the structure of their skull, Miklouho-Maclay came to the conclusion: there are no racial differences in the structure and functioning of the “thinking machine”! The brain structure of all people, regardless of race, is the same. This is the brain - Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens) - a certain unified category. These or those differences in the pattern of cerebral convolutions, in the weight and size of the brain are of a private nature and do not have a decisive significance. The shape and size of the skull and brain do not provide grounds for distinguishing “higher” and “lower” races. Within large races there are groups that have in different forms skulls Brain size and weight are also not reliable criteria for assessing intelligence.

Later studies confirmed this point of view. Today it is known, for example, that the weight of Turgenev's brain was 2012 grams, Academician Pavlov - 1653 grams, Mendeleev - 1571 grams, Gorky - 1420 grams, Anatole France - 1017 grams... As we see, the main thing is not the size of the brain, but the ability to use it use.

Miklouho-Maclay also made another important conclusion: the division of peoples into “dolichocephalic” and “brachycephalic” - that is, “long-headed” and “short-headed”, or, in the language of racists, into people of a higher and lower race, is a dangerous delusion. Among dark-skinned peoples there are both “long-headed” and “short-headed” - and almost to the same extent as among civilized Europeans. The Russian scientist risked putting forward his “anti-racial” theory. Its essence is as follows.

The shape of a person’s head is largely determined by what his many ancestors did. If among them were people primarily engaged in intellectual or minor physical work - for example, aristocrats, officials, bankers, landowners, merchants, writers - the shape of the head, in this case, may increase, “lengthen”. If the number of ancestors was dominated by people of heavy physical labor - for example, peasants, workers, soldiers, athletes - then their descendant’s head shape may decrease, “round up”. However, Maclay emphasizes, the main thing is not this, but the fact that even with such physiological transformations, the mental qualities of the brain in both remain practically unchanged. Consequently, “civilization” is not in the size of the head, but in skill. And skill, as you know, is an acquired skill. This is how the Russian scientist reasoned.

By the way, about ten years ago the German magazine Der Spiegel published the results of a scientific study. It completely confirms Miklouho-Maclay’s assumptions.

A group of scientists decided to subject the notorious “racial theory” to scientific revision. In nine countries - Great Britain, Germany, Ukraine, Mongolia, Japan, Australia, Canada, South Africa and Brazil - detailed anthropological measurements of the inhabitants of these countries were carried out over several years. In addition, attention was paid to the place of residence and occupation of the subjects. After processing all the data, which took a whole six months, the scientists stated with great amazement: in percentage terms, regardless of the country of study, the number of “long-headed” and “short-headed” turned out to be approximately the same. Namely: 35% to 65%. It has also been noted that the percentage of "longheads" becomes noticeably higher in large cities, and decreases in rural areas and small towns. It is curious that scientists have not discovered a connection between the shape of the head and a person’s profession. But they noted, although insignificant, the predominance of “long-headed” - about 57% - among different levels managers and superiors.

In their comments, scientists quoted Bernard Shaw, who noted that “each of us will be born with a backside fit for a throne.” And as a final summary, they cited the famous statement of Confucius, who twenty-six centuries before this scientific “discovery” argued: “the nature of people is the same; They are separated only by customs.”

“MACLAY DOESN’T NEED WOMEN...”

Arthur Schopenhauer once joked angrily: “The only man who cannot live without women is a gynecologist.” Miklouho-Maclay, a scientist to the core, was never one of the ladies' men, and in many ways shared the views of the German pessimistic philosopher. Under his influence, from the age of 18 he adopted a casual and patronizing manner in communicating with women. The fashion for “nihilism” also contributed to this. He, young Bazarov, chopping frogs, does not want to deal with trifles. He is a “man of action”.

When a certain Augusta, a young lady from the German province, begins to bombard him with love letters, Maclay will answer her completely in the spirit of Bazarov: “I write when I want to say or communicate something, and I write what I need, and not empty phrases..." And then: “I am a bored egoist, completely indifferent to the aspirations and lives of other good people, who is obedient only at will who considers kindness, friendship, generosity only beautiful words that pleasantly tickle the long ears of kind people. Yes, dear young lady, I don’t look like the portrait that your imagination painted... In conclusion, I give you advice: when you want to see people beautiful and interesting, observe them only from afar...”

Later, on the islands of Oceania, Miklouho-Maclay would leave the following entry in his diary: “The women sat at a respectful distance, as befits “number two”....” And next to it: “... a normal attitude (toward a woman - A.K.) has been preserved in the Papuan world.”

What kind of normal attitude is this? We read further: “For Papuans, women are more necessary than for us Europeans. Their women work for men, but with us it’s the other way around. This circumstance is associated with the absence of unmarried women among the Papuans and a significant number of old maids among us. Here every girl knows that she will have a husband. This is why Papuans care relatively little about their appearance. And they get married early - at 13-14 years old.” Quite a strange thought for a European, isn’t it?

Is it easy for a young and sexually mature man to live without a woman? Probably not very much. Even if he declares that “we have no time to make love, we are in a hurry to reach the goal.”

When the Russian traveler first set foot on the shores of New Guinea, many Papuan women ran away when they saw him, leaving traces of “bear disease” on the ground. However, the women’s behavior soon changed: they vying with each other and began to flirt with the “man from the moon.” As soon as the scientist appeared somewhere, they emerged from nowhere, lowered their eyes, swam past, almost touching the “tamo rusa”. Moreover, their gait became shamelessly fidgety, and their skirts moved even more vigorously from side to side. That was real coquetry.

To all the marriage proposals that came from literally every village - who didn’t dream of becoming related to him! - Nikolai Nikolaevich invariably answered:

Maclay doesn't need women. Women talk too much and are generally noisy, and Maclay doesn’t like that.

One day, the Papuans of one of the villages decided to marry their great friend at all costs...

HOW TO MARRY “TAMO RUS”?

The most chosen bride was beautiful girl. Bungaraya, that was her name. When Maclay saw her for the first time, he involuntarily exclaimed: “Fairy!”

In general, according to Miklouho-Maclay’s descriptions, Papuan women were quite beautiful: “...The skin is smooth, light brown in color. Hair is naturally matte black. The eyelashes reach a considerable length and are beautifully curved upward... The breasts of young girls are conical in shape and remain small and pointed until the first feeding... The buttocks are well developed. Men find it beautiful if their wives move their rear parts when walking so that with each step one of the buttocks is sure to turn to the side. I often saw in villages little girls, seven or eight years old, who were taught this wagging of their butts by their relatives: the girls spent whole hours memorizing these movements. The dance of women consists mainly of such movements.”

The women were busy dressing the bride. The best tortoiseshell combs were brought, the best aprons of coconut fringe with black and red stripes, the most beautiful necklaces and bracelets and the most beautiful earrings in the form of chains to bone rings. Unaware of the conspiracy, the scientist, returning to his hut in the evening, spread a blanket, inflated a rubber pillow and, taking off his shoes, dozed off. In the morning, with the punctuality of a scientist, he wrote in his diary:

“I was awakened by a rustling sound, as if in the hut itself; it was, however, so dark that it was impossible to make out anything. I turned over and dozed off again. In a dream, I felt a slight shaking of the bunks, as if someone was lying on them. Perplexed and surprised by the courage of the subject, I extended my hand to make sure whether anyone really lay down next to me. I was not mistaken; but as soon as I touched the native's body, his hand grabbed mine; and I soon could not doubt that a woman was lying next to me. Convinced that this incident was the work of many and that dads and brothers were involved, etc., I decided to immediately get rid of the uninvited guest, who still did not let go of my hand. I quickly jumped off the barle and said: “No glee, Maklay nangeli avar aren.” (“You go, Maclay doesn’t need women.”) After waiting until my night visitor slipped out of the hut, I again took my place on the barl.

While awake, I heard rustling, whispering, and quiet talking outside the hut, which confirmed my assumption that not only this stranger, but her relatives and others took part in this trick. It was so dark that, of course, the woman’s face could not be seen.

The next morning I did not consider it appropriate to collect information about the previous night’s episode - such trifles could not be of interest to the “man from the moon”. I could, however, notice that many people knew about it and its results. They seemed so surprised that they didn't know what to think."

Maclay's temptations did not end there. The Papuans probably decided: how could Maclay, in the darkness of the night, see who was predicted to be his wife? It is necessary to arrange a show, and he himself chooses the path that suits his heart.

The bridesmaid ceremony was arranged, but Maclay again puzzled the Papuans. He said decisively:

Aren! No!

ALL FAIRIES BITE

And yet the affair with the “fairy” took place. One day he swam in the river at dawn, and by evening he was already lying with a fever. It was here that Bungaraya showed up to the sick scientist. Could the exhausted wanderer continue to resist his own nature and the magical charms of the young beauty? “I suppose,” Miklouho-Maclay wrote in his diary after the first night spent with her, “that Papuan caresses of men are of a different kind than European ones, at least Bungaraya watched my every move with surprise and although she often smiled, I don’t think that it was only a consequence of pleasure."

From that day on, she began to come to him almost every night.

Two more excerpts from Maclay's diary:

"May 10. In the evening Bungaraya came again. In the morning, when leaving, I gave her a piece of katun, which, it seems, she was not satisfied with... She said something, but I could not understand, it seems that she asked for money, wanted earrings, a bracelet. Hearing that I was laughing (it was dark), she began to mutter something angrily, and I laughed even more, she pushed me in the side several times, not too gently, then even intended to bite me twice out of frustration. I calmed her down..."

"may 13. It was 7 o'clock in the evening, I was sitting at my meager dinner, when for a moment my people both came out onto the back veranda. Bungaraya carefully made her way past me into the bedroom. I had to hide it, it’s good that the bed has a curtain. She brought a plate of eggs. It’s strange that she came, and even with a gift, when I didn’t give her anything the day before.”

Subsequently, Miklouho-Maclay no longer devoted space in his diary to his nocturnal adventures, getting off with short entries like “Bungaraya came again” or “Bungaraya comes every day.”

From letters and the few surviving diaries it is known that Bungaraya is not the only love of the Russian traveler. There was also Manuela, “a beautiful Peruvian from Callo,” and Mira, “a remarkably thick-lipped girl,” and Pinras, “not a pretty girl, even in the European sense.” And also Mkal, “an interesting object who turned out to be a pretty young woman.”

In one of the huts of the Oran-Utan tribe, he saw a girl whose face immediately caught his eye with her cuteness and pleasant expression. The girl's name was Mkal, she was 13 years old. Miklouho-Maclay said that he wanted to draw it. She hurried to put on a shirt, but he warned that this was not necessary. Soon Mkal stopped being afraid of the strange and bearded white man. In the evenings, when Miklouho-Maclay was working, she sat next to him. “Here girls become women early,” the traveler wrote in his diary. “I’m almost convinced that if I tell her: “Come with me,” and pay my relatives for her, the novel is ready.” However, he could neither tell her “come with me” nor take Mkal with him. He set too many tasks for himself as a scientist, and marriage and family are, in his opinion, “joy for a month and sadness for a lifetime.”

And then one day Maclay, amid the cries of the aborigines who wished him Bon Voyage, sat down with the servants in the pirogue. Mkal was also in the crowd; she stood silently on the shore. “I would willingly take her with me,” thought Miklouho-Maclay again. While the pirogue floated down the river, Miklouho-Maclay and Mkal did not take their eyes off each other.

RIDDLE OF THE SIX LETTERS

And yet, Maclay did not meet his true love in New Guinea or even in Russia. This happened in Australia. At this time, Nikolai Nikolaevich was 38. His chosen one, Margaret Robertson, the daughter of the Australian governor, was much younger and looked like a 13-14 year old girl.

In his numerous travels, Miklouho-Maclay completely undermined his health. The fever haunted him, and he decided to live a little in a country with a favorable climate - Australia. On December 4, 1881, walking through Clovely House Park, he saw old Robertson, a recent governor of New South Wales. Robertson was walking through the park with his daughter Margaret. Seeing her, Miklouho-Maclay was instantly captivated. A small, modest, shy and charming girl immediately won his heart.

Margaret's relatives and friends opposed the marriage and even demanded that Miklouho-Maclay give permission to marry from the Emperor himself. Alexander III favorably met Miklouho-Maclay's request, and the wedding took place in Australia.

A month after the wedding, Miklouho-Maclay wrote to his friend Alexander Meshchersky: “Indeed, I now understand that a woman can bring true happiness into the life of a person who never believed that it existed in the world.”

Margaret bore him two sons - Alexander and Vladimir. Nikolai and Margaret loved each other very much: he was a gentle and caring husband, she was a passionately loving, affectionate and devoted wife.

Their happiness was as short as a breath. They lived together for only four years. And their happiness turned out to be mercilessly difficult. It played and shone against the chilly, dim background of almost continuous illness and lack of money, bordering on real poverty. Margaret, who moved to her husband in St. Petersburg, deprived of friends and relatives, who did not speak Russian, felt both her body and soul chilling among the unusual Russian snows and under the gray St. Petersburg sky. A few lines from her diary: “January 18, 1888. I don't sing or play as often as I'd like, because the fireplace in the living room takes up so much wood, and we have to be very careful how we use it... March 22, 1888. This morning they sent me a request to deposit 12 rubles for the piano for the coming month. I had the fortitude to say that I no longer needed the piano, and they sent for it at 4 o’clock. It's gone! My poor room looks very gloomy and empty. I’m completely killed by the fact that I don’t have him anymore...”

He was buried at the Volkov cemetery in St. Petersburg. At Margaret's request, the carver engraved six capital Latin letters N.B.D.C.S.U. on the tombstone, which she once wrote on the first photograph given to him long before the wedding.

Margaret Miklouho-Maclay returned to her homeland and lived another 48 long years of sad life without him. She lived modestly - on a small income from the property that belonged to her husband in Russia. The revolution of 1917 put an end to this too... But Margaret always remembered Russia brightly and with love. She conveyed her reverent feeling for him to Nikolai Nikolaevich’s sons, Alexander and Vladimir.

What do those strange Latin letters inscribed on Maclay’s grave mean? Nobody knows the exact answer to this question. However, many biographers agree that, most likely, these are the initial letters of the words of the oath that Nicholas and Margaret once swore to each other: “None but death can separate us” - “Nothing but death can separate us.”

AMATEUR SPY

Well, what about the “espionage” of the Russian traveler? Was? Did not have? Let us follow the principle of Miklouho-Maclay himself: “lies were created to save slaves and cowards; the only true path of a free person is the truth,” and we honestly admit: yes, indeed, Nikolai-Nikolaevich sent reports to Russia that, generally speaking, can be called “spy.” Speaking in particular, several reservations should be made here.

Firstly, during the entire period of his “espionage” the Russian scientist sent a total of only three (!) reports to Russia.

Secondly: in collecting information for his reports, he used not the information that his friends and acquaintances - political and public figures in England and Australia - told him during personal meetings, but mainly Australian newspapers.

Thirdly: from a military point of view, Miklouho-Maclay’s reports show him as a complete amateur. He collects military information in an extremely careless and unprofessional manner. For example, when listing converted ships, he ends their list with the words “and others whose names I don’t remember.” Sometimes the “would-be-scout” himself is not sure of the reliability of his information: “There are (it seems) 3 small armored ships in Melbourne, 1 or 2 in Adelaide.” As for the actual secret data, the Russian scientist did not even try to reveal it.

Historian A.Ya. Massov in the book “Russia and Australia in the second half of the 19th century” writes: “Is it possible today, more than 100 years after the events described, to call the information activity of N.N. Miklouho-Maclay “espionage”, and he himself be classified as “knights of the cloak and dagger”? Most likely no. The information he collected and transmitted to Russia was of a fairly innocent nature. This, strictly speaking, has been the work of diplomats at all times, and in the absence of a full-fledged Russian embassy in Australia at that time, the Russian scientist only occupied a certain niche in complex system relations between two empires - Russian and British.

He was certainly driven by patriotic aspirations and a sincere desire to promote territorial acquisitions and strengthen Russia’s position in the South Pacific. Moreover, the Russian scientist wanted the indigenous inhabitants of the northern coast of New Guinea, so dear to his heart, to become subjects of the Russian crown and to be protected from European adventurers, including gold hunters, who often invaded new British colonies, destroying the traditional way of life indigenous tribes. Note that gold had already been found in New Guinea by that time. It is possible that a certain role in the participation of N.N. Miklouho-Maclay’s collection of military-political information was influenced by his desire to thank Alexander III for subsidizing his scientific activities in the past and to morally justify applying for a new scholarship.”

“Ultimately,” concludes Massov, “N.N. Miklouho-Maclay remained in history as an outstanding scientist and traveler. The informal side of his activities, of course, which did not remain a secret for the Australians, did not prevent them from recognizing his scientific achievements and significant contribution to the development of Russian-Australian relations.”

THE MYSTERY BURNED IN THE FIREPLACE

Shortly before his death, Miklouho-Maclay asked his wife to fulfill his last wish: to burn his diaries. Margaret did not dare refuse him. She burned them in the fireplace without even trying to find out what terrible secret they kept. It would seem that everything that the Russian traveler wanted to keep silent about turned into a handful of ash in an extinguished fireplace. But, as they say, there is nothing secret that would not someday become apparent.

The first who managed to lift the veil over the mystery of the burnt diaries was the Russian writer and historian Boris Nosik. No matter how shocking this may sound, the truth is this: Miklouho-Maclay was sexually attracted to underage girls and boys... Now it becomes clear where his strange, unfounded hostility to women - mature women - came from.

“If Maclay realized back in his student years,” writes Boris Nosik in the book “The Mystery of Maclay,” that he was “badly coping with this interest,” he could not help but think about the consequences of this “interest.” In Europe, and especially in Russia, such “interest” could end badly. Maclay already knew from books that in tropical countries, among the natives, his “interest” would not seem criminal to anyone. Girls mature there for love at 13, and at 12, and at 10 years old... And he decided that he had only one thing left - escape to the tropics... Or death (like Tchaikovsky)... He was talented, energetic, furious... He turned the course of his life. He fled to the tropics."

Prince Meshchersky is probably the only person privy to this intimate secret of Maclay. In letters to him, Nikolai Nikolaevich is extremely frank. Here is a letter dated May 11, 1871, sent by Maclay from Valparaiso: “We have been here in Valparaiso for 3 weeks. In the meantime, I became very interested in a girl of 14 and a half years old - and sometimes I do a bad job of dealing with this interest. She asked, among other things, yesterday to get her some Russian stamps; Please send her about 12 different, but already used, stamps with the following address... I will be very grateful. Do not forget! You may smile when reading this request - but I so rarely meet people I like that for them I am ready to do a lot and even am ready to bother you with these trifles.”

The prince was probably not embarrassed by his friend’s “interest”, nor by the strange request, nor by the red-hot impatience in his tone...

Here is a letter dated June 21, 1876: “I am not sending the portrait of my temporary wife, which I promised in the last letter, because I did not take one, but the Micronesian girl Mira, who is with me, if ever she becomes such, it will not be earlier than a year.” Another letter from South America: “There were two girls here, very (physically) developed for their age; the eldest, who was not yet 14, was missing only a man with as bigger size penis; the youngest, who was hardly 13 years old, had beautiful, full breasts... The night was well spent in the hut of Señor Don Mariano Gonzalez.”

It would be possible to quote other “revelatory” letters, but... Let's stop there. After all, in the words of Maclay himself, “to see people as beautiful, one should only observe them from afar.” And we seem to have come too close.

Be that as it may, small things should not detract from the great things that exist in a person. After all, “not everyone,” Boris Nosik draws a line under “Maclay’s secret,” “who fled to the tropics, became Maclay, a pioneer of science, a discoverer of new paths, a humanist, a defender of the downtrodden, a friend of the natives and their saint, a hero, an adventurer, a winner, a great son of his homeland. Not everyone was able to ultimately curb themselves and “take a wife” in order to finally return to the world Christian civilization. He turned out to be capable of this too. Honor and glory to him..."

Alexander KAZAKEVICH

Biography of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay

Miklouho-Maclay Nikolai Nikolaevich (born July 5 (17), 1846 - death April 2 (14, 1888) - Russian ethnographer, anthropologist and traveler, an outstanding scientist who studied the indigenous population South-East Asia, Australia and Oceania. The famous Maclay Coast, a section of the northeastern coast of New Guinea, bears his name.

Now probably no one knows the true length of his routes. After all, besides the famous 15 months of life on the Maclay Coast, there were many other journeys full dangerous adventures. Precious materials were collected, which would be enough for a good dozen travelers.

Origin

The future traveler was born on July 17, 1846 in the village of Rozhdestvenskaya near the city of Borovichi, Novgorod province. The family included people from Germany, Poland, and Scotland. His father, Nikolai Miklukha, was a nobleman, but first of all he was proud of his grandfather Stepan, the cornet of one of the Little Russian Cossack regiments, who distinguished himself during the capture of Ochakov in 1772. He was a railway engineer with the rank of captain and the first head of the Nikolaevsky station in St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, the death of the father greatly affected the financial situation of the family. Nikolai was 11 years old at that time. A widow with 5 children experienced serious financial difficulties, but was able to give her children a good education.

Early years. Youth. Education

Kolya was sent to the German “School of St. Anna” in St. Petersburg, but then transferred to the Second St. Petersburg Gymnasium. But in the sixth grade the boy was expelled for poor academic performance and violation of discipline. This, however, could not prevent the future scientist from enrolling as a volunteer student at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at St. Petersburg University in 1863. Nikolai was also soon expelled from there, despite the not entirely intelligible wording - “...repeatedly violated the rules established for these persons while in the university building” (that is, auditors). The young man was expelled with a “wolf ticket,” that is, without the right to study at other universities in Russia. To continue education, it was necessary to go abroad.

1864 - the young man entered the philosophy department of one of the best European universities in Heidelberg. But soon the student became disillusioned with philosophy and took up medicine. After some time he moved to Jena.

At that time, there were heated debates among natural scientists over different theories. Some argued that all the peoples of the world descended from a single ancestor, others defended the opposite point of view. Among them, many believed that “colored” peoples were closer to animals than Europeans. Undoubtedly, Nikolai could not help but be interested in these problems, but an important event occurred in his life that temporarily pushed these interests aside.

Expedition to Madeira and the Canary Islands

The famous naturalist and staunch supporter of Darwin's ideas, Ernst Haeckel, taught at the University of Jena. The new student soon attracted the attention of the professor, and in 1866 he invited him to take part in a trip to Madeira and the Canary Islands as his assistant. After this, having gained a taste for field work, Miklouho-Maclay headed to Morocco and walked around this unsafe country for Europeans, then visited Sicily, Spain and France.

Expedition to the Red Sea

At this time, under the influence of Haeckel, he studied marine fauna. He continued the same activity in 1869 on the Red Sea. To avoid clashes with Muslims, the young scientist followed the example of many European travelers, that is, he learned Arabic and transformed into an Arab: he shaved his head, painted his face and put on Arab clothes. In this form, with a microscope in his hands, he wandered along the shores and coral reefs in search of marine life that interested him. But the unbearable heat, hunger and illness weakened his health, and he had to return to his homeland.

Ernst Haeckel (left) with assistant Miklouho-Maclay (1866)

Homecoming

In Russia, the young scientist, on the recommendation of Haeckel, began to work under the guidance of one of the patriarchs of Russian science, academician Karl Baer. In addition to marine fauna, the famous scientist was very interested in the problems of human origins. It was he who convinced his young assistant of the need to study primitive peoples for ethnographic and anthropological purposes. Nikolai dreamed of moving from the tropics gradually, over the course of 8-9 years, to the north, to the Okhotsk and Bering Seas. With this idea, he, having enlisted the support of prominent scientific travelers, began to besiege the Russian Geographical Society, primarily its head, the famous navigator Fyodor Litke.

But by that time, in the Russian government, and even in the Geographical Society itself, interest in scientific research in the Pacific Ocean had been significantly lost. And yet, Miklouho-Maclay was still able to obtain permission to be taken on a Russian military ship heading to the area of ​​interest to him. In Astrolabe Bay on New Guinea, where no one has set foot white man, he, accompanied by two servants, had to land on the shore and remain there among the Papuans, who were reputed and in fact were cannibals. The Geographical Society allocated an insignificant amount of 1,350 rubles for the needs of the expedition.

First expedition to New Guinea

1870, October 27 - the military corvette "Vityaz" left Kronstadt. His route passed through the Strait of Magellan, so the traveler was able to conduct some research on Easter Island, Tahiti and Samoa. Nikolai Nikolaevich reached the main goal of his journey on September 19, 1871. Both the captain of the corvette Nazimov and the seasoned sailors of the Vityaz believed that it was necessary to land only accompanied by an armed detachment. But Miklouho-Maclay refused. Together with two servants, Ohlson and Boy, he went to the shore.

The uninvited guests were greeted with hostility by the Papuans. They were shot at, however, with the intention of scaring them, not killing them. Spears were waved in front of their faces. But Maclay’s amazing restraint and contempt for Maclay’s death, as well as his always even and friendly behavior, helped overcome mistrust. The famous episode can eloquently testify to this: Miklouho-Maclay was able to force himself to fall asleep in the presence of the natives threatening him with weapons. Soon the Papuans were delighted with their guest. They became his friends, often came to visit and brought gifts.

People even came from other islands to see Tamo-rus (Russian man). The natives allowed the traveler to measure himself and cut off the hair from his head (though in exchange for strands of Maclay’s own hair). He was able to move freely around the island, made beautiful sketches, and photographed a section of the coast from Cape Croisile to Cape King William. With the help of the island's owners, Tamo-rus collected unique collections, including human skulls, which are extremely necessary for anthropological research.

The scientist not only studied the Papuans - he shared their joys and sorrows, treated them, and talked about distant countries. The traveler was able to stop the internecine wars on the island during his stay. The natives paid him with affection, and once even organized a brideshow for him, being wary that the neighbors from Bili-Bili and Bongu would lure the guest of honor to themselves. I barely managed to escape the fate of being the husband of three Papuans at once. Nikolai Nikolaevich said that women make a lot of noise, but he loves silence. This was understandable, and the natives fell behind.

1) Miklouho-Maclay with the Papuan Akhmat (1874-75)
2) Miklouho-Maclay in Queensland (1880)

"Man from the Moon"

Nevertheless, the Papuans were not at all harmless. Not only the personal qualities of the scientist and his kind attitude towards the natives played a role in their love of peace. At first, the New Guineans apparently considered the traveler kaaram-tamo (Man from the Moon), immortal, so they did not touch him, but only scared him. We must pay tribute to the scientist - he did not delude himself about the owners of the island. When Boy was dying from inflammation of the peritoneum, Mikloukha-Maclay did not hide that the natives were very interested in whether his servant would die or not. If he dies, the aliens will turn out to be not gods at all, but simple people.

It is difficult to say what would have happened if Boy had died in front of the Papuans. Perhaps they would want to verify the scientist’s immortality experimentally. But this happened at night; Maclay chose not to take risks and lowered the servant’s body into the ocean so as not to provoke the natives into aggressive actions. He knew very well about the cannibalism of his dangerous friends and had direct evidence of this. One day, along with breadfruit, they brought him pieces of human meat as a gift. Guests from the neighboring island of Vityaz made it clear to their favorite Tamorus that they would never eat him - there were plenty of others.

But gradually all fears faded into the background, but it became increasingly difficult for Maclay to do work. Ohlson was a bad helper, he was often sick and lazy. The researcher also suffered from a severe fever, chronic diseases worsened - catarrh of the stomach and intestines, and ulcers appeared on the legs. In addition, the food from Vityaz had come to an end, and there was very little protein food on the island. The traveler, unaccustomed to this, began to weaken, but continued to explore even the reactions of his body to local conditions.

On the clipper "Emerald"

Meanwhile, a message was published in German newspapers that Miklouho-Maclay had died. The Russian government sent the clipper Emerald to find out his fate. 1872, December 19 - he entered Astrolabe Bay. Having learned that their compatriot was alive, the sailors loudly shouted “Hurray!”, terribly frightening the natives. However, there was no collision.

At first, the scientist, despite his terrible physical condition, flatly refused to leave without finishing his work. He was convinced that the Geographical Society would not give money for a new expedition, and asked only to leave him food. But the captain of the Emerald persuaded the explorer to rest in the Dutch colonial possessions in East India. He knew for sure that a scientific expedition would soon arrive in these places and could take him with them. Touchingly saying goodbye to the Papuans and promising that he would return, Tamo-Rus, to the roar of long New Guinea drums, safely departed on board the ship.

In the Philippines, in Singapore, on the island. Java

But the next meeting with the Papuans did not happen as soon as the scientist expected. Along the way, he came to the conclusion about the need for a comparative study of the Papuans, Melanesians and Philippine Negritos. For this purpose, Miklouho-Maclay visited the Philippines, stayed in Singapore, on the island. Java, where he lived at the residence of the Governor General in Beitenzorg. In the city, whose name translated means “carefree,” the traveler was able to rest, receive medical treatment, and sort out the materials of the first expedition.

Second trip to New Guinea

1873 - he again went on a long journey, first to about. Amboin in the South Moluccas archipelago, and then to the coast of Papua Covia New Guinea. There, near Cape Quince, the scientist built a hut in which he settled. Now his escort numbered 16 people.

One day, a scientist went far inland to explore the area near Lake Kamaka Wallar. There he discovered a previously unknown tribe of Papuans, the Waau-Sirau. Meanwhile, on the shore it played out terrible tragedy. The local Papuans were attacked by natives from Kiruru Bay. The Papuans from Kiruru won, and at the same time plundered Maclay's hut and killed his people, including several women and a child, with particular cruelty. One of the unfortunate people was cut into pieces right there on the table, probably so as not to waste time cutting up the meat later. In addition, the sources near the hut turned out to be poisoned.

As it turned out later, the Papuans were looking for Maclay to kill. They were incited to this by their long-time ill-wisher Tama-Rusa, the head of one of the nearby villages named Susi. A few days later, a large detachment repeated the attack, but the scientist and the surviving members of his group were able to manage to move to the island. Aidum.

Soon Susi and a detachment appeared on the island. Maclay, apparently distinguished by desperate courage, upon learning of this, calmly finished his coffee, took a pistol and, accompanied by only two people, went to the pirogue in which the robbers had arrived. Susi was nowhere to be seen. The thatched roof made it impossible to see into the depths of the boat. Then Maclay pulled off the roof, grabbed the huge Papuan by the throat and put a pistol to his head. Susi's companions did not dare to intervene even when their commander was tied up. He was later handed over to the Dutch authorities. Maclay and his companions were no longer disturbed.

Having finished his work, the scientist returned to Amboin, where he became seriously ill with fever. In Europe, nothing was known about him for a long time. The English government ordered the captain of one of its warships to urgently search. He completed the task, but found the researcher in such a state that he had no doubt that his death was imminent. But the fortitude of Tamo-rus was again able to defeat death. He again continued his research on the Malay Peninsula, where in the upper reaches of the river. Pahan found the remains of the dying Orang Sekai (Semang) tribe, but due to bouts of fever he was forced to go to Singapore.

Travel map of Miklouho-Maclay

Return to Astrolabe Bay

Having barely recovered from his illness, Miklouho-Maclay visited Fr. Yap (Carolina Islands), Admiralty Islands, and then fulfilled his promise and returned to Astrolabe Bay.

Here Tamo-Ruso was greeted with delight. The celebration of communication with old acquaintances continued for several days. The old hut was destroyed by earthquakes and ants, but the sailors from the ship and the natives built a new one. Maclay himself planted palm trees around it and planted a new vegetable garden. Scientific work continued. In 17 months, the scientist was able to study 150 Papuans, collect unique information about Papuan dances, everyday pantomimes, and holidays.

It was clear that the natives fell deeply in love with their unusual friend. However, the question of the immortality of the Man in the Moon still tormented them. One day, one of the natives, whose life a traveler had once saved, directly asked if he could die. The scientist did not want to lie to his friend and found Solomon's solution. He took the spear and handed it to the native so that he could find out the question that interested him. The calculation was correct: he could not raise his hand against Tamo-Rus.

The days and months flew by quickly. In addition to the researcher’s fever, neuralgia was also added. Therefore, when a British schooner accidentally approached the shore, he decided to leave New Guinea. Promising to return, he warned his friends that evil white people could come here and kill and take people into slavery.

Third trip to the Maclay Coast

In 1881 and 1883 Maclay visited the islands of New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Santa Cruz, and the Admiralty and again collected a significant amount of material on anthropology, ethnography, zoology and geography. 1883 - he visited the Maclay Coast for the third - and last - time, but lived there only for eight days. Here sad changes awaited him. Traders of “black goods” visited the shore. Many friends were killed or died. Leaving the Papuans with an ox, a cow, a goat and a goat, seeds of corn and other plants, Maclay again went to Sydney. Doctors had long warned that the tropics had a detrimental effect on his health, while Australia’s climate, on the contrary, was favorable.

Sydney. Marriage

Sydney was well known to the scientist. There, with his direct participation, a zoological station was created. In this, he was actively supported by the Prime Minister of the Australian state of New South Wales, Sir John Robertson. His daughter, 22-year-old Margaret, soon became the most dear person to Maclay. The young woman reciprocated his feelings. Despite the serious obstacles that arose due to differences in religion, the lovers still united. Maclay obtained the king's permission to consecrate the marriage according to the Protestant rite. And the Orthodox ceremony was performed three years later in Vienna, on the way to Russia.

Death

The couple lived together for only 4 years. 1887 - with two young sons they arrived in St. Petersburg. The traveler did not have time to finish processing the expedition materials. Only part of his colossal work was published in German and Russian magazines. His attempts to protect the natives from violence from European countries also ended in failure. 1888 - Germany declared New Guinea its possession. Miklouho-Maclay managed to protest, but on April 14 of the same year he died in St. Petersburg. He was only 41 years old.

Memory

Margaret and the children returned to Sydney. She donated everything from her husband’s heritage that was of the slightest scientific value to the museums of St. Petersburg and Sydney. For the remaining 48 years of her life, she honored the memory of Nikolai Nikolaevich and raised her children and grandchildren with a sense of reverent memory of her father and grandfather. Their descendants now live in Australia and carefully preserve the memory of their amazing ancestor.

The result of a titanic research work Miklouho-Maclay Nikolai Nikolaevich provided strong evidence that the “savage” peoples of New Guinea, Malaya, Australia, Oceania, and therefore other non-European territories, are completely equal to the so-called “civilized” peoples of the planet. He studied the biological and physiological properties of the brains of dark-skinned people, the structure of their skulls, and on this basis boldly, contrary to the assertions of many fans of white racial superiority (and even not all whites), declared: there are no racial differences in the functioning of the brain among the peoples of the Earth.

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 of 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 they are 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, along the way, visiting Copenhagen, Madeira Island, Easter Island, Tahiti, the Samoan Islands, the island of New Ireland, 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.

The key to understanding the structure of primitive society in the early seventies 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 the early stage of the development of human society, through which all peoples once passed, disappears. .

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 smug 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,” that’s what he said 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 write down 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 the life path of this man 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, and just accepted by Maclay under the high hand of 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 supported on arched aerial roots, should have been lost to botany, not a single jellyfish shimmering in the blackness of the night ocean - for zoology, not a single song flying 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 a wise man who knew 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, and cut the hair on their heads for microscopic examination. 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 flora and fauna; 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, to 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, to 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 them to return, 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 Beitenzorge, 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 on a new journey: to explore Papua Koviai - the southwestern coast of New Guinea, subject to Holland 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 residence 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 Papuans 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 an end to the theft of people.

“Lawlessness flourishes unchecked,” he wrote bitterly in this letter. “It would be 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 coast 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 camp sites 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 magazines, 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 Sea Bird.

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 notebook, camera-lucida and measuring instruments. And everywhere it is gaze found something new that 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 undertook 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 of the natives in me,” Miklouho-Maclay subsequently reported to the Geographical Society based on the entries in his diary, “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 of a killing character than a war or battle in an 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 to 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, the wide brim of which 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 for some more time in front of Saul 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 all the power firearms compared to 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 customs of the English, American, German, and 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 the social duty of a 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 of labor,” 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 as many varieties of the Melanesian tribe as possible 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 extremely 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 “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. Correspondents unanimously noted the deep attention to the quiet, devoid of all kinds externalities, the pithy 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 publish 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.

Arrived last period life of a great traveler. 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 last years In life, he sought to process the extracted material, and not to 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 joining 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 wanted 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 entering 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 a general meeting of settlers,” wrote Miklouho-Maclay. “Every year, all net profits from the cultivation of the land will be divided among all participants in the enterprise in proportion to their position and labor.”

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 person. 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

Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho - Maclay was born on July 17, 1846. He was born in the village of Yazykovo-Rozhdestvensky, Novgorod province. The future famous ethnographer and traveler was born into a noble family. The biography of Nikolai Miklukha is rich in many different events and interesting facts.

Nikolai's father, Nikolai Ilyich Miklukha, was a railway engineer. Mother Ekaterina Semyonovna came from the noble family of Beckers, who distinguished themselves during Patriotic War 1812. Because of his father's work, the family was forced to constantly move. In 1855, the entire family arrived for permanent residence in St. Petersburg. Miklouho-Maclay’s family was of average income, but there was only enough money for education and raising children.

After his father's death, Nikolai's mother made a living by drawing geographical maps. This gave her the opportunity to invite teachers to her home for her two sons Nikolai and Sergei. Since childhood, Nikolai mastered the German and French languages. His mother hired an art teacher for him, who was able to discover artistic abilities in the boy.

For the first three years after moving to St. Petersburg, Nikolai attended a private school, but after the death of his father, paid education became unavailable for the family. The brothers were transferred to a state gymnasium. Studying was difficult for the boy. Nikolai often skipped classes. Soon he took part in a student demonstration and ended up in prison.

Studying at the University

Nikolai quit studying at the gymnasium after entering the 6th grade and began listening to lectures at the university. His attention was attracted by scientific activities, so he became a volunteer student at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of St. Petersburg University. In addition to the basic courses, Nikolai seriously studied physiology. However, getting a diploma higher education in Russia he failed. Due to a small incident, the young man was forbidden to attend lectures.

The desire to study natural sciences was so strong that the mother, giving in to her son’s persuasion, sent him to study in Germany. While living abroad, Nikolai changes to three different universities. He first entered the University of Heidelberg, then transferred to the medical faculty of the University of Leipzig. The last place of study is the University of Jena, where Nikolai studies animal anatomy. Having received his diploma, the young man returns to Russia.

Scientific activity of Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho - Maclay

The University of Jena gave Nikolai the opportunity to participate in a scientific expedition for the first time. He was Haeckel’s favorite student and assistant, so at the professor’s request he went with him to Sicily to study the flora and fauna of the Mediterranean. Practical experience was useful to Nikolai during his trip to the island of Tenerife.

The real scientific activity of Nikolai Nikolaevich began after his trip to Morocco. He discovered several types of microorganisms. However, the local population did not understand the scientists’ interest, and the expedition had to be curtailed. The scientist returned to Jena only in 1867. This summer, Nikolai published his first scientific article in the Jena Journal of Medicine and Natural History.

The scientist undertook two large and long trips to New Guinea, where he studied the life and activities of local tribes. Initially, the local population was wary of the researcher, but then he was accepted as a good friend. Nicholas lived in New Guinea from 1870 to 1872.

Personal life of Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho - Maclay

The scientist’s lectures were a success not only in Europe, but also in Russia. He spoke about the natives of New Guinea at meetings with the imperial family. Subsequently, Nikolai Nikolaevich conducted several more expeditions to Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Australia. While in Australia, Nikolai met his future wife Margarita Robertson - Clark. In 1886 they officially got married. From this marriage Nikolai had two children.

In 1887, the scientist returned to Odessa. Here he creates a project for a scientific marine station, but Emperor Alexander the Third did not support his decision. Numerous travels and research worsened Nikolai’s health. He received a serious jaw disease, which doctors later determined was a malignant tumor. Nikolai Nikolaevich died in 1888.