48 H. P. STEENSBY. 
For all later travellers and portrayers of Eskimo culture the 
representation of the Danish Eskimo was the starting point, and 
naturally their first endeavour was to find conformity with these, 
and to point out the cultural unity of the Eskimo. Cranz proved 
that the Labradors were of the same people as the Greenlanders, 
and at the same time drew attention to the quite corresponding 
descriptions given by Russian travellers of the inhabitants of Bering 
Strait, which even in 1618 had been navigated by DrscHNev, and 
again in 1728 by BERING. 
From 1734, after Brrine’s last journey, a large number of 
Russian adventurers whose only object was to turn to account the 
wealth in furs, streamed to the Aleutian Islands and the nearer 
American Islands south of Alaska. With great daring these, to a 
great extent, un-nautical people undertook the sea-route from 
Ochotsk to Kadjak, the geographical position of which they were 
incapable of reckoning. In order to get the islands charted, and 
navigation set in order, the Russian government, after 1764, frequently 
sent out Naval officers, whose reports, however, got no further than 
the government offices in Petrograd. By degrees the Russian dis- 
coveries extended along the coasts of Norton and Kotzebue Sounds, 
and certain expeditions went to the interior of Alaska. Besides 
their activity on the Aleutian Islands and in Kadjak, which in 1798 
became the seat of “the United Russian-American Со.,” the Russians 
founded the more northern trading station St. Michael in Norton 
Sound; but the literature had all the while to be content with 
the rough descriptions given by individual mariners like Cook and 
LANGSDORFF. 
Not until towards the middle of the 19th century did more expli- 
cit accounts about the inhabitants of the Alaskan coast and the Aleu- 
tian Islands begin to arrive. VENJAMINOV, to whom WRANGEL gave the 
honourable title of “the second Egede,” worked during 1824—38, but at 
that time the Aleuts and the Eskimo had already been for a hundred years 
under destructive influence, and much of their individuality had been 
lost. In 1839 WRANGEL's account of the colonial conditions in Russian 
America was published. In 1852 the hydrographic department of the 
Russian Admiralty communicated important extracts from LEVASCHEV’S 
diary for 1764—69, and at the same time Erman’s Archive brought 
the most important parts of other older reports of travels. 
In this manner ethnographical authors like Ногмвеве and Daur 
got the necessary material for their studies and descriptions of the 
Eskimo culture furthest west. The first result was the establishment 
of the similarity of the culture in question to the well-known South 
Greenland Eskimo culture. The same skill in the handling of the 
water-craft, and the same kinds of implements and hunting methods 
being found in Greenland as in South Alaska. On the strength of 
a чьи 
