NORTHERN PASSAGE TO INDIA. 9 



fishery, was informed by the Fischal Zeeman of 

 India, that in the sea of Tartary there was a whale 

 taken, in the back of which was sticking a Dutch 

 harpoon, marked with the letters W. B. This cu- 

 rious circumstance was communicated to Peter 

 Jansz Vischer, probably a Greenland whaler, who 

 discovered that the harpoon in question had belong- 

 ed to William Bastiaanz, Admiral of the Dutch 

 Greenland fleet, and had been struck into the whale 

 in the Spitzbergen sea *. 



IMuUer refers to a similar circumstance when re- 

 cording the first discovery by sea, of the peninfjula 

 of Kamtchatka by the Russians, in the year I7I6. 

 The crew of the discovery vessel having wintered 

 on the western coast of Kamtchatka, he infonns us, 

 that during their stay there, " the sea cast upon the 

 shore a whale that had in its body a harpoon of 

 European workmanship, marked with Roman let- 

 ters f ." Another account of the same nature, given 

 by Hendrick Hamel, in his " Unfortunate Voyage 

 of the yacht Sparwer, in the year 1653," and pu- 

 blished in the " Recueil des Voyages," corroborates 

 the testimony of ISIuller. Hamel, in his narrative 

 of the loss of this vessel on the Island of Quel- 

 pacrt, observes, that '" in the sea to the north-east 



* Beschryving tier Walvisvangst, vol. ii. p. 38. 



t MuLLEu's Voyages from Asia to America; Jeffrey's 

 Translation^ p. 45, 



