532 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chap. 



large ship had made their escape to the woods. The seafarers 

 sailed on along the coast and landed at several places in order 

 that they might meet with the inhabitants, but for a long time 

 without success, until at last they fell in with a Kamchadal 

 p"irl, who was collecting edible roots. With her as a guide they 

 soon found dwellings, and even Cossacks, who had been sent out 

 to collect tribute. They wintered at the river Kompakova. 

 During the winter the sea cast up a whale, which had in its 

 carcase a harpoon of European manufacture and with Latin 

 letters. The vessel left the -winter haven in the middle of 

 May (new style) 1717, but meeting with ice-fields was beset 

 in them for five and a half weeks. This occasioned great 

 scarcity of provisions. In the end of July the seafarers were 

 again back at Okotsk. From this time there has been regular 

 communication by sea between this town and Kamchatka. 

 The master of the vessel during the first voyage across the 

 Sea of Okotsk was the Cossack Sokolov.^ 



From what I have stated it follows that, thanks to the 

 fondness of the hunters and Cossacks for adventurous explor- 

 atory expeditions, the current ideas regarding the distribution 

 of the land and the courses of the rivers in north-eastern Asia 

 were in the main correct. But, in consequence of want of 

 knowledge of, or of doubts regarding, Deschnev's discoveries, 

 there prevailed an uncertainty whether Asia at its north-east 

 extremity was connected with America by a small neck of land, 

 in the same way as it is with Africa, or as North and South 

 America are connected with each other, a view which, in 

 consequence of the unscientific necessity of generalising 

 inherent in man, and the wish to have an explanation of 

 how the population extended from the old to the new world, 

 was long zealously defended.^ No one, either European or 

 native, had yet, so far as we know, extended his hunting- 

 journeys to the northernmost promontory of Asia, in conse- 

 quence of which the position which it was assumed to occupy 

 only depended on loose suppositions. It was possible for 



1 Miiller, iii. p. 102. According to an oral communication by Busch, 

 Strahlenberg's account (p. 17) of tliis voyage appears to contain several 

 mistakes. The year is stated as 1713, the return voyage is said to have 

 occupied six days. 



2 As late as 1819, James Burnej^, first lieutenant on one of Captain 

 Cook's vessels during his voyage north of Behring's Straits, afterwards 

 captain and member of the Royal Society, considered it not proved that 

 Asia and America are separated by a sound. For he doubted the correct- 

 ness of the accounts of Deschnev's voyage. Compare James Burney, A 

 Chronological History of North-eastern Voi/ages of Discover//. London, 1819, 

 p. 298 ; and a paper by Burney in the Transactions of the Royal Society, 

 1817. Burney was violently attacked for the views there expressed by 

 Captain John Dundas Cochrane. Narrative of q, Pedestrian Journeij through 

 Russia and Siberian Tartary, 2nd ed. London, 1824, Appendix. 



