134 BERING STRAIT 



be told by those high in office at St. Petersburg that he 

 could not possibly have been there as they had not got 

 it on their maps where he said it was, and, consequently, 

 he was to go where he had been as soon as he could to 

 make sure. He started on this voyage of verification, 

 but circumstances were against him and he did not 

 reach there ; and his Japanese trip remained discredited 

 until the Russian geographers knew better. His voyage 

 thither had, however, used such a stock of provisions 

 that it was two years before the deficiency could be 

 made up, and it was actually the 4th of September, 

 1740, seven and a half years after leaving St. Peters- 

 burg, when Bering, in the specially-built St. Peter, and 

 Tschirikof, in her sister the St. Paul, got off outward 

 bound to America. 



In about three weeks they were at Awatcha Bay on 

 the east of Kamchatka, anchored in the fine harbour 

 named Petropaulovsk after the two ships, and here 

 they had to stay for the winter, so that they did not 

 leave Russian territory until the 4th of the following 

 June. A few days out the ships were separated in a 

 fog and storm, and the St. Paul reached the American 

 coast first, at Kruzof Island on the western shore of 

 Sitka Sound. The St. Peter three days afterwards, on 

 the 18th of July, drifted to the coast more to the 

 northward, at Cape St. Elias near the mighty moun- 

 tain of that name. In this neighbourhood amid much 

 fog Bering stayed six weeks until he was blown out to 

 sea, when, his men beginning to die from scurvy, he 

 resolved to return to Kamchatka. It was a voyage of 

 misfortune in a continual downfall, the men in want, 

 misery, and sickness, continuously at work in the cold 



