568 THE VOYAGE OP THE VEGA. [ohap. 



a hundred species of flowering plants, among which were a con- 

 siderable number that he had not before seen on the Chukch 

 Peninsula. Space does not permit me to give another list of 

 plants, but in order that the reader may have an idea of the 

 great difference in the mode of growth which the same species 

 may exhibit under the influence of different climatal conditions, I 

 give here a drawing of the Alpine whitlow grass [Drabci alpina, 

 L.) from St. Lawrence Bay. It would not, perhaps, be easy 

 to recognise in this drawing the species delineated on page 

 260, the globular form, wliich the plant assumed on the 

 shore of Cape Chelyuskin exposed to the winds of the Polar 

 Sea, has here, in a region protected from them, completely 

 disappeared. 



At the rocky headlands there were still, however, considerable 

 snowdrifts, and from the heights we could see that considerable 

 masses of ice were still drifting along the Asiatic side of 

 Behring's Straits. During an excursion to the top of one of the 

 neighbouring mountains. Dr. Stuxberg found the corpse of a 

 native laid out on a stone-setting of the form common among 

 the Chukches. Alongside the dead man lay a broken percussion 

 gun, spear, arrows, tinder-box, pipe, snow-shade, ice-sieve, and 

 various other things which the departed was considered to be in 

 want of in the part of the Elysian fields set apart for Chukches. 

 The corpse had lain on the place at least since the preceding 

 summer, but the pipe was one of the clay pipes that I had 

 caused to be distributed among the natives. It had thus been 

 placed there long after the proper burial. 



Anxious as I was to send off soon from a telegraph station 

 some re-assuring lines to the home4and, because I feared that 

 a general uneasiness had already begun to be felt for the fate of 

 the Vega, I would willingly have remained at this place, so 

 important and interesting in a scientific point of view, at least for 

 some days, had not the ice-belts and ice-fields drifting about in 

 the offing been so considerable that if a wind blowing on land 

 had risen unexpectedly, they might readily have been dangerous 

 to our vessel, which even now was anchored in> a completely 

 open road, for the splendid haven situated farther in in 

 St. Lawrence Bay was still covered with ice, and consequently 

 inaccessible. On the afternoon of 21st July, accordingly, when 

 all were assembled on board pleased and delighted with the 

 results of the morning visit to land, I ordered the anchor to 

 be weighed that the Vega might steam across to the American 

 side of Behring's Straits. As in all the Polar seas of the 

 northern hemisphere, so also here, the eastern side of the Straits 

 was ice-bestrewn, the western, on the other hand, clear of ice. 

 The passage was at all events a rapid one, so that by the after- 

 noon of the 2ist July we were able to anchor in Port Clarence, 



