62 NOVAYA ZEMLYA 



Thus Hudson drops out of our story at his first 

 mutiny, for he did not cross the Arctic Circle on his 

 fourth voyage, when his second mutiny ended his career 

 in the bay that bears his name, which, like the river 

 and the strait, was indicated on the maps years before 

 he went there. 



In 1664 Willem de Vlamingh, the Dutch navigator, 

 or to be cautious the namesake of the Dutch navi- 

 gator, who thirty-one years afterwards found Dirk 

 Hartog's plate and named Swan River in West Aus- 

 tralia after the black swans, was in these regions and 

 rounded Novaya Zemlya into the Kara Sea, reaching so 

 far north that if his recorded latitude be correct he 

 must have sighted the Franz Josef archipelago, and, 

 contrary to the tendency of Arctic explorers, mistaken 

 land for a bank of mist or a group of icebergs. After 

 him neither Dutch nor English delay us, the opening 

 up of this continuation of the Urals being left to the 

 Russians, who found it first and named it Novaya 

 Zemlya meaning simply New Land. 



For years it was left to the Samoyeds and the walrus 

 hunters, whose persistent reports of deposits of silver in 

 its cliffs led to Loschkin's making his way round it and 

 spending two winters on its east coast. In 1768 Ros- 

 mysslof, also on silver bent, wintered in Matyushin 

 Shar, that wonderful waterway, ninety fathoms deep, 

 bounded by high hills and precipitous cliffs, winding so 

 sharply that ships have been into it for a dozen miles or 

 so and seeing no passage ahead have come out again to 

 seek it elsewhere. In 1807 came Pospeloff, with Lud- 

 low the mining engineer, to settle the silver question 

 once for all, and settle it they did by showing that 



