Prejevalski, NICHOLAS

Prejevalski, NICHOLAS, Russian traveller, was born in the government of Smolensk on 31st March 1839. He entered the army (1855), and took part in quelling the Polish insurrection of 1861. Having joined the general staff in 1867, he was moved to Siberia. There he began to satisfy his longing for travel by exploring the Usuri region, south of the Amur. This, however, was a small thing in comparison with his subsequent labours in geographical exploration. The three years 1871-73 he spent in travelling from Peking through southern Mongolia (region of the Ordus) to the Ala-shan, Koko-nor, and the upper waters of the Yang-tse-Kiang. Four years later he made the first of the journeys undertaken with the hope of reaching Lhasa in Tibet, the goal of all his subsequent efforts. He rediscovered Lob-nor on the borders of East Turkestan and China, but failed three times in the same year to penetrate into Tibet. Two years afterwards he once more set out, and, after crossing the difficult highland region between East Turkestan and Tibet, had reached a point some 160 miles north of Lhasa, when the Tibetan authorities turned him back. He then went east, and explored the upper course of the Hoang-ho for about 200 miles, and finally reached Kiachta after a journey of nearly 15,000 miles. In the winter of 1883-84 he once more crossed the Desert of Gobi, and got as far as the upper Yang-tse-Kiang, but, not being able to cross it or travel down it, was obliged to return. He died at Karakol, on the east side of Lake Issyk-kul in West Turkestan, just starting on his fifth expedition, on 1st November 1888. Prejevalski brought back from these journeys most valuable collections of animals and plants, now all preserved at St Petersburg; amongst other things that he discovered were the wild camel and the wild horse, the ancestors of the domesticated varieties. His accounts of his journeys were published in the Proceedings of the St Petersburg Geographical Society, in Petermann's Mitteilungen, and other journals, as well as in two independent Russian works (1875 and 1883). See Nature, 8th November 1888, and Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., 1879 et seq. The name also appears in the forms Prjevalski, Prchevalsky, and Prschevalsky.