THE EXPLORERS OF NORTHERN SIBERIA 85 



of his ship three hundred miles from his winter quar- 

 ters, to which he had to travel on foot, losing twelve 

 men by cold and exhaustion on the way. Within the 

 preceding four years the survey of the coast west of it 

 had been completed in four stages from Archangel to 

 Yalmal (that is Land's End) ; from Yalmal to the Obi ; 

 from the Obi to the Yenesei ; from the Yenesei to 

 Cape Sterlegof. In 1735 Pronchistschef, from the 

 Lena, failed to round Cape Chelyuskin from the east, 

 and returned to the Olenek to die but two days before 

 his young wife, who was his companion on his perilous 

 voyage. Two years afterwards Dmitri Laptef began 

 his explorations east of the Lena which took him to 

 Cape Baranoff, thus joining up to the discoveries of 

 the sable -hunters made a century before, including 

 those of Deschnef, who, in 1648, sailed from the 

 Kolyma to Kamchatka and went through Bering 

 Strait more than thirty years before Bering was born. 

 Thus the route of the North-east Passage was known, 

 although no man had travelled the whole way either 

 by land or sea, before the task was undertaken by 

 Nordenskiold. 



To begin with, Nordenskiold made two voyages to 

 the Yenesei. In the first voyage he left Tromsoe in the 

 Procven on the 14th of June, 1875, and reached what 

 he named Dickson Harbour at the mouth of the 

 Yenesei on the 15th of August. Sending back the 

 Proeven, which returned through Matyushin Shar, he, 

 with Lundstrom the botanist and Stuxberg the zoolo- 

 gist, and three walrus-hunters, embarked in a boat they 

 had brought out with them and proceeded up the 

 estuary into the river ; and during the first six hundred 



