Karelin travels in Caspian Sea.

“Of the surveyed shores, the most suitable place for the construction of a fortification is Kaydaka Bay,” Karelin summed up. “Here, the waters near the shore are deep, and the springs of fresh water rare for these places on the Kyzyl-Tash cliff, and an abundance of building materials - stone, lime, clay for the construction of houses and structures.”

Grigory Karelin. “Expeditions to explore the north-eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. 1832."

Karelin at Zhangir Khan headquarters in Urda.

In 1829, Karelin retired and in 1830 entered the service of the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For his work on describing the lands and the nomadic life of the Kazakhs, he is promoted to titular adviser.
Karelin was left under the khan of the inner Kyrgyz horde, Dzhangir Bukeev, where he worked at his headquarters - Ryn-Peskakh, under a private agreement with the khan, from 1828, helping to manage the affairs of the khan, to engage in various sciences with him.
He lived at the headquarters in extremely cramped conditions, about which he wrote to his wife with humor. he entire headquarters consisted of a house for the khan and two houses for his assistants, as well as dugouts where the guards and the retinue of the khan were located. Karelin wrote that it was necessary to build barracks, a department for the sick, a store with warehouses, and stables at the expense of the treasury.
Khan all year round, with the exception of the summer months, lived at headquarters. Karelin helped the khan restore order in the horde subject to the khan. He saw the inconvenience experienced by the nomads due to the lack of suitable places for keeping herds, wrote complaints on behalf of the khan about the fact that the Ural army ousted the nomads from the lands between the Small and Big Uzen, that “to calm the Kyrgyz people, it is necessary to give it to the inheritance all those lands.
Living under Khan Dzhangir, Karelin met the biys and sultans of the khanate, became closely acquainted with the life and way of life of the nomadic people, studied their language, and when traveling steadfastly endured the hardships of nomadic life.
“We spent the night in the reeds, sitting in a circle by the fire. The frost was about 17 degrees, ”Karelin wrote to his wife in December 1828.
In the summer of 1831, under the command of Colonel Gens, a new expedition was organized to the steppe to the heights of Tobol. Grigory Karelin was instructed to “determine the latitudes of the places of the most important points, especially in the mountains and tracts of the Kirghiz-Kaisak steppe, make observations on the oscillations of the magnetic pendulum, barometric and others, collect information about the localities near and far, pay attention to the flow of rivers and the direction of mountain ranges, collect information about all kinds of products of nature in these places, almost not yet explored, and therefore even more deserving of the attention of a test scientist.
As you can see, the high authorities saw in Karelin a natural scientist and therefore entrusted him with a wide range of duties. Karelin fulfilled the instructions with great zeal - he described the route traveled from the Ural River to Tobol, determined their location at five points of the route in an astronomical way, compiled a journal, which was later presented to Emperor Nicholas the First.
Karelin work was highly appreciated, and in May of the following 1832, Grigory Karelin was appointed head of the expedition to explore the northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea. The salty winds of the Caspian Sea blew into the sails of Karelin's fate. In August 1832, four ships with 170 members of the expedition entered the Khvalyn Sea, as the Caspian Sea was indicated in Semyon Remezov's "Drawing Map of All Siberia".
Peter the Great was also interested in the Caspian Sea, who in 1716 equipped and sent an expedition of Prince Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky here with the order "... to find a water way to India." During the Khiva campaign the following year, Bekovich-Cherkassky died, and the map compiled by him was lost. It was found only after many years.
The tasks of the Karelin expedition were very extensive. In addition to finding a site for a harbor-fortress, extensive geographical surveys of the coast and coastal regions were to be carried out. For eighty days, four ships sailed along the northeastern shores of the Caspian. Groups of researchers went ashore and made trips to the steppe, collecting samples of minerals, studying the flora and fauna of the places they had traveled.
For almost two weeks Karelin explored the steep rocky chalk cliffs of the Aktau and Karatau ridges, and to the southeast - a flat nameless hill, which he called the Mangyshlak ridge. The main result of the expedition was 12 maps of the route - the north-eastern part of the Caspian Sea, the Kaydak Bay, the mouths of the Ural River, the Yaman-Airakli mountain, many islands encountered along the way, the Inder salt lake, etc. In addition, a diary, a marine journal, astronomical and magnetic observations, notes on the shallowing of the mouth of the Urals and the Caspian Sea, on sea robbery in the northern part of the water area, on seal hunting, sea fishing, etc. were presented.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs became interested in the results of the expedition, Karelin was summoned to St. Petersburg, where in a report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Nesselrode he spoke in general terms about the expedition, about the choice for the construction of a Russian fortification on the northeastern coast of the Caspian Sea.
“Of the surveyed shores, the most suitable place for the construction of a fortification is Kaydaka Bay,” Karelin summed up. “Here, the waters near the shore are deep, and the springs of fresh water rare for these places on the Kyzyl-Tash cliff, and an abundance of building materials - stone, lime, clay for the construction of houses and structures.”
Emperor Nicholas I became interested in Karelin's report and appointed him an audience. Grigory Karelin enthusiastically wrote to his wife about the reception, dinner, and a long conversation with the tsar. In 1833, Karelin was asked to prepare for a new expedition, and he set about repairing and preparing ships, and began buying food and materials. On May 2, the expedition landed on the shore and laid the fortress.
“The diligent Cossacks dragged flagstones, and in noon the redoubt grew, as if stretched out of the ground by the ears,” Karelin wrote. The fortification was laid on the high bank of the Ustyurt and named Novo-Aleksandrovsky. The fortification could accommodate up to a hundred courtyards, a church with a small plot and a bastion.
The fortress allowed the passage of trade caravans to Khiva for 12 days. “The nomadic inhabitants expressed their joy at the construction of a new city by the Russians, which promised them protection from predators and the means of barter and trade in such a close distance,” Karelin reported in another letter.
In August, the Novo-Aleksandrovskoye fortification was visited by the Orenburg Governor-General V.A. Perovsky. and was very pleased with what he saw. Karelin, performing the task entrusted to him, showed great diligence, responsibility, and organizational talent. He was allowed to return to his family in Orenburg.
In January, he was informed that two ships with provisions for the garrison of the new fortress were stuck for the winter at the mouth of the Urals, which threatened with disastrous consequences. Karelin immediately got ready to go to the rescue.
After several days of continuous horse racing, he was in Guryev, quickly organized a rescue convoy. Provisions were loaded onto a hundred sleighs, and they set out on their way across the coastal ice. When the fortress was already in sight, one of the camels loaded with a cannon and the sleigh in which Karelin rode fell through the ice.
Fortunately, Karelin was saved by the oncoming Cossacks, and in wet clothes on a riding horse he rushed to the fortress, which was only seven miles away. From the sharp wind and frost, his dress was iced over. Recalling this episode, Karelin compared himself to a walnut in a sugar crust.
The ability to self-sacrifice was one of the character traits of Grigory Karelin, it manifested itself many times in his life. Karelin's success in campaigns and expeditions was helped by his iron health. In 1836 G.S. Karelin went on the third, largest expedition - this time to the southeastern shores of the Caspian Sea in order to explore the sea route for trade with Persia.
By the end of September, the expedition approached the Kara-Bogaz Bay (black mouth in Turkmen), which has long been surrounded by mystery and notoriety. Local residents claimed that there was an abyss in it, which swallows and absorbs ships that dare to penetrate its waters.
The ships of Admiral Simonov during the time of Peter the Great did not dare to enter the bay - the team raised a rebellion. The English captain Budruf also passed by the bay. Noting in the sailing directions he compiled: “Near the Kara-Bogaz Bay, in many places there are high rocks far from the coast, which seem to be islands. It is unwise to approach them."
Karelin, together with an expedition member, officer Blaramberg, decided to enter the bay in boats. Karelin's boat sailed along the eastern shore, the other along the western shore. Here is how the military engineer, Lieutenant General I.F., recalls this. Blaramberg:
“The wind was picking up. The waves rose so high that they constantly flooded the boat, salt settled on clothes, faces and hands, because the water in the bay was salty ... The waves rising from the wind threw us into the surf, which would have overturned our longboat if my brave Ural Cossacks had not rushed across neck into the water and, supporting him from both sides, they did not drag him to the shore. Exhausted to death, soaked to the skin, with grains of salt on our faces, hands and clothes, we spent a cold September night on the shore in gloomy reflection.
Only a day later, Karelin managed to connect with Blaramberg, who noted in his memoirs: “If Karelin had not been able to connect with me, the consequences for me and my companions could have been sad.” Karelin wrote to his wife:
“We went from the Balkhan Bay to the Karabugaz Bay and were the first of the Russians to set foot on its inhospitable terrible shores. Here we almost died. Only God saved us."
And in the official report on the results of the trip he reported: “there are no coasts in the Caspian Sea so decisively and in all respects unsuitable as the shores of Kara-Bogaz-Gol.” The writer Konstantin Paustovsky took these words of Karelin as an epigraph to his story "Kara-Bugaz".
Only decades later, researchers uncovered the secrets of the Kara-Bogaz-Gol Bay. It turned out that the water level in the bay is 4-5 meters lower than the level of the Caspian Sea, and this causes a constant influx of water from the sea into it at a speed of up to three meters per second. And if you add wind to this, the picture becomes complete.
The difficulties of the trip to the Kara-Bogaz-Gol Bay were rewarded to the participants of the expedition along the southern generous nature of the Caspian shores. From a letter from Karelin to his wife: “July 14, 1836. Palace in the gardens of Shah Abbas the Great in Eshref on the shore of the Astrabad Bay.
I am writing to you under the influence of admiration from a place that is rare on earth, and about which I read only in the fairy tales of Scheherazade. You have never seen anything like it in a dream ... Cypress trees rise like an arrow one and a half times higher than our Orenburg Peter and Paul Bell Tower, cedars, chestnuts, oranges, narinj and turinj, oranges, lemons, figs and other outlandish trees with an extraordinary thickness and height ....
How I would like to bring you a few orange and orange trees, which in our presence were mercilessly cut down like a worthless shrub...".
During this expedition, Grigory Karelin also showed himself as a diplomat. During an international meeting with the elders of one of the strongest Turkmen tribes, nomads, he persuaded them to mutually beneficial trade.
And so the expedition ended. Karelin wrote: “Thanks to the mercy of God, I completed the expedition and, I dare to think, with honor and success. On October 11, in the morning, we saw a four hillock lighthouse, the first object of our native coast, and in the evening we anchored against quarantine, at the so-called Biryuchaya Spit.
Here, after cleaning all our belongings and the ships themselves, we will sit for 14 days and then we will set off along the Volga to Astrakhan, a hundred miles from here. The Almighty was pleased to save us from the danger of sailing in places unknown, and some completely new, where the Russian foot has never set foot. All returned healthy…”
Everything is left behind, and the numerous bays and shores of Aktam (Uzboy), and the Balkhan Mountains, the island of Cheleken (in the 20th century, due to the shallowing of the Caspian Sea, it will become a peninsula), where oil poured out of the ground with boiling water, the exotic Turkmen settlement of Gasan -Kuli and porphyritic rocks of the Krasnovodsk Bay, desert lands forgotten by God, and paradise flowering lands of Persia.
In this expedition, Karelin made full use of the complex method of studying nature, developed by Alexander Humboldt. The expedition members collected rock samples, took water samples, surveyed areas with the help of a compass and theodolite, determined the pressure of the air ocean, the temperature of water and air, collected samples of flora and fauna.
The Caspian expeditions of Grigory Karelin in 1832-1836 became a significant contribution to geographical science. The result of the expeditions was the description and mapping of the eastern coast with a length of more than 1200 kilometers. Along with hydrographic studies, studies of the coastal areas of the land were carried out, the latitudes of individual places were determined.
On the generalized map of the Caspian Sea, made by Karelin, along with the coastline, islands, shoals, river mouths, depths (along the route of the expedition), roads leading to Khiva and Bukhara were shown. Upon returning to Orenburg, it took Karelin time to put in order the huge collected material and process it.
his work was assisted by the Cossack constable Maslennikov, topographer Alekseev, and his wife Alexandra Nikolaevna. Karelin, smoking a pipe with a long chibouk, walked up and down the room, dictating, correcting and supplementing texts.
Then there were reports in the Asian Department, a trip to St. Petersburg. His reports to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance were highly appreciated. G.S. Karelin was promoted to court councilors and received 3,000 silver rubles, with which he bought a library for himself and his family.
While he was making Caspian trips, his family was still replenished. Almost without a father, four daughters grew up - Sonya, Nadya, Sasha and Liza, to whom her mother, Alexandra Nikolaevna, gave herself completely, brought up, taught literacy, foreign languages. Due to the circumstances, the father and mother became more and more distant from each other.
Grigory Karelin loved to write letters, he wrote them a lot and easily. Academician V.I. Lipsky, a researcher of his work, calculated that Karelin corresponded with almost three hundred correspondents - relatives, friends, work colleagues, etc. It is interesting to read his letters, they are written in excellent literary language. In the letters you feel the passionate and kind soul of the author, a delicate, respectful attitude towards people.
Here is the beginning of one of his letters. “Forgive me magnanimously for nothing inexcusable silence and for your everlasting kindness to me, put anger on mercy ...” I deliberately resort to frequent quoting of his letters in order to bring the reader closer to already distant events, to convey the “aroma”, the spirit of the past. And if this is at least to some extent successful, it is only thanks to the brilliant epistolary skill of our hero, which the reader will be able to verify by continuing to read this essay.

Authority:
Novikov Vladimir Yakovlevich "Karelin's Caspian Odyssey".
http://novikovv.ru/grigoriy-karelin/kaspiyskaya-odisseya-karelina