RUSSIAN ADVANCE IN SIBERIA 3 



Company Land and Gam a Land 



It is no wonder that these three reports, that of the Jesuits, 

 Vries, and Texeira, of the three poorly described territories, 

 Yezo, Company Land, and Gama Land, bewildered the cartog- 

 raphers. They were at a loss to know whether the lands in 

 question were islands or continents, whether they were parts of 

 America or of Asia, whether they were three distinct lands or 

 one and the same. On the maps of the second half of the seven- 

 teenth and the early part of the eighteenth century all these 

 views, and many others besides, found expression. Johann Bap- 

 tist Homann of Nuremberg, on his map of about 17 12, suggested 

 that Terra Esonis was probably the northwest coast of America 

 and the same land that Gama discovered ; on the other hand Guil- 

 laume Delisle, in a memoir which he read before the Paris 

 Academy of Sciences in 1720, made the statement that Yezo 

 was a part of Asia and that Japan was a peninsula of it. The 

 difference in the point of view of these two men gives an idea of 

 the confusion on the subject that existed at the beginning of the 

 eighteenth century. There was only one way of clearing up 

 these difficulties, and that was by actual investigation. 



The Russian Advance in Siberia 



During the century and a half that the cartographers were 

 losing themselves in their speculations and paper explorations 

 of the North Pacific the Russian trappers, traders, tribute 

 gatherers, and missionaries were wandering over the length and 

 breadth of Siberia and pushing their discoveries to the "Eastern" 

 Ocean. They had not, however, a clear idea of what they were 

 doing; they had not even a very good mental picture of the land 

 they discovered. 



By actual navigation they had learned that the Ob, Yenisei, 

 and Lena emptied into the "Icy" Sea, that the Amur, Ud, and 

 Okhota flowed into the Eastern Sea; but they were ignorant as 

 to whether there existed a passage between these two seas. They 



