had been sunk in more than twenty places between the Argún and the Shílka, and eight zavóds, or smelting-furnaces, had been constructed for the reduction of the ore. The mines were worked at first by peasants brought from other parts of Siberia and forcibly colonized at points where their labor was needed, but in 1722 their places were taken to some extent by hard-labor convicts deported from the prisons of European Russia. Since that time the mines have been manned partly by colonized peasants and partly by common criminals of the penal-servitude class. With the exception of Poles and a few of the Decembrist conspirators of 1825, political convicts have not been sent to the Nérchinsk silver-mining district until within the last two or three years. Thousands of Polish insurgents were transported thither after the unsuccessful insurrection of 1863,[1] but since that time political offenders, as a rule, have been sent to the mines of Kará.
Our first objective point, after leaving Strétinsk, was the Alexandrófski Zavód, or Alexander Works, distant in a southwesterly direction about one hundred and twenty-five miles. The "Works," from which the place originally derived a part of its name and all of its importance, were abandoned many years ago and gradually fell into ruins, but the village attached to them still lingers in a moribund condition and now sustains a small convict prison. As we wished to examine this prison, and as the Alexandrófski Zavód, moreover, was a convenient point of departure for the once famous but subsequently abandoned mine of Akatúi, we decided to make there a short stay. The weather when we left Strétinsk was cold and cloudy, with a raw wind from the northeast. The low, desolate mountains between which we traveled were whitened by a thin film of snow, but the
- ↑ According to Maxímof, who had access to the official records, the number of Poles exiled to Siberia between the years 1863 and 1866 was 18,623. Of this number 8199 — including 4252 nobles, — were sent to Eastern Siberia and 7109 of them were condemned to penal servitude. Nearly all of the last-named class went to the Nérchinsk silver mines. Maxímof, "Siberia and Penal Servitude," Vol. III, pp. 80, 81. St. Petersburg: 1871.
