348 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chap, ix., 



In 1869 the bark Navy anchored under Kolyutschin Island from 

 the 8th to the 10th October. On the 10th October of that year 

 there was no ice south and east of Wrangel Land." 



These accounts show that I indeed might have reason to be 

 uneasy at my ill luck in again losing some days at a place at 

 whose bare coast, exposed to the winds of the Polar Sea, there 

 was little of scientific interest to employ ourselves with, little at 

 least in comparison with what one could do in a few days, for 

 instance, at the islands in Behring's Straits or in St. Lawrence 

 Bay, lying as it does south of the easternmost promontory of 

 Asia and therefore sheltered from the winds of the Arctic Ocean, 

 but that there were no grounds for fearing that it would be 

 necessary to winter there. I also thought that I could come to 

 the same conclusion from the experience gained in my wintering 

 on Spitzbergen in 1872-73, when permanent ice was first formed 

 in our haven, in the 80th degree of latitude, during the month of 

 February. Now, however, the case was quite different. The 

 fragile ice-sheet, which on the 28th September bound together 

 the ground-ices and hindered our progress, increased daily in 

 strength under the influence of severer and severer cold until it 

 was melted by the summer heat of the following year. Long 

 after we were beset, however, there was still open water on the 

 coast four or five kilometres from our winter haven, and after our 

 return home I was informed that, on the day on which we 

 were frozen in, an American whaler was anchored at that 

 j)lace. 



Whether our sailing along the north coast of Asia to Kolyut- 

 schin Bay was a fortunate accident or not, the future will show. 

 I for my part believe that it was a fortunate accident, which will 

 often happen. Certain it is, in any case, that when we had come 

 so far as to this point, our being frozen in was a quite accidental 

 misfortune brought about by an unusual state of the ice in the 

 autumn of 1878 in the North Behring Sea. 



