XIII.] MADELENE'S ACCOUNT. 561 



laden with Chinese goods. The crews appeared to be Russian 

 or Hanseatic. Conversation was carried on with them in Latin, 

 They stated that they came from a very large town, situated a 

 little more than a hundred leagues from the sound. In the 

 middle of June Maldonado returned by the way he came to the 

 Atlantic, and on this occasion too the voyage was performed 

 without the least difficulty. The heat at sea during the return 

 journey was as great as when it is greatest in Spain, and 

 meeting with ice is not mentioned. The banks of the river 

 which falls into the haven at Ajiian Sound (according to 

 Amoretti, identical with Behring's Straits) were overgrown with 

 very large trees, bearing fruit all the year round : among the 

 animals met with in the regions seals are mentioned, but also 

 two kinds of swine, buffaloes, &c. All these absurdities show 

 that the whole narrative of the voyage was fictitious, having 

 been probably written with the view of thereby giving more 

 weight to the proposal to send out a north-west expedition from 

 Portugal, and in the full belief that the supposed sound actually 

 existed, and that tlie voyage along the north coast of America 

 would be as easy of accomplishment as one across the North 

 Sea.^ The way in which the icing down of a vessel is described 

 indicates that the narrator himself or his informant had been 

 exposed to a winter storm in some northern sea, probably at 

 Newfoundland, and the spirited sketch of the sound appears to 

 have been borrowed from some East Indian traveller, who had 

 been driven by storm to northern Japan, and who in a channel 

 between the islands in that region believed that he had dis- 

 covered the fabulous Anian Sound. 



Of a third voyage in IGGO a naval officer named DE la 

 Madelene gave in 1701 the following short account, probably 

 picked up in Holland or Portugal, to Count DE Pontciiartrin : 

 " The Portuguese, David Melguer, started from Japan on the 

 14th March, 1660, with the vessel le Pere Mernel, and following 

 the coast of Tartary, i.e. the east coast of Asia, he first sailed 

 north to 84° N.L. Thence he shaped his course between 

 Spitzbergen and Greenland, and passing west of Scotland and 

 Ireland came again to Oporto in Portugal." M. de la Madeline's 

 jaarrative is to be found reproduced in M. Buache's excellent 

 geographical paper " Sur les differentes idees qii'on a eues de la 



^ The narratives of the Russian voyagers in the Polar Seas bear a quite 

 different stamp. Details are seldom wanting in these, and they correspiond 

 with known facts, and the discov-eries made are of reasonably modest 

 dimensions. 1 therefore consider, as I liave said already, that the doubts 

 of the trustworthiness of Deschnev, Chelyuskin, Andrejev, Iledenstrom, 

 Sannikov, &c., are completely unfounded, and it is higldy desirable that 

 all journals of Russian explorers in the Polar Sea yet in existence be 

 published as soon as possible, and not in a mutilated shape, but in a 

 complete and unaltered form. 







