PUBLISHED SOURCES 351 



When the officers returned to Kamchatka they had several 

 copies made of their papers and forwarded them to the Admir- 

 alty College. These copies occasionally differ from one another, 

 as might be expected, because of the copyists; but it is possible to 

 check up the errors. Many of the expressions then used are now 

 archaic and can be found only in old Russian and Dutch diction- 

 aries. 



Published Sources 



For the first two decades of the eighteenth century the printed 

 material is found in the "Pamyatniki Sibirskoi Istorii." The "Pol- 

 noe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii" contains the instruc- 

 tions to the officers in Siberia and the navigators. Bering's report 

 to the Empress on his first voyage is printed without comment in 

 Zapiski Voenno-Topograficheskago Depo. Berkh in his "Per- 

 voe Morskoe Puteshestvie Rossiyan" edited the log book of the 

 first voyage which was kept by the midshipman, Peter Chaplin. 

 Vakhtin in "Russkiye Truzheniki Morya" printed additional docu- 

 ments on this voyage. Gvozdev's report and other material 

 bearing on the sighting of the American coast in 1732 may be 

 found in Zapiski Hydrograficheskago Departamenta. Steller's 

 "Reise von Kamtschatka nach Amerika" is the only original docu- 

 ment of importance dealing with the second sea voyage which 

 has up to this time appeared in print. 



Miiller, Gmelin, and Krasheninnikov were members of Ber- 

 ing's second expedition though they did not go to sea with him. 

 Their writings may be classed partly as original and partly as 

 contemporary documents, depending altogether on the topics 

 which they discuss. About the middle of the nineteenth century 

 a friendly controversy arose between Karl Ernst von Baer, a 

 German scholar residing at St. Petersburg, and Lieutenant Soko- 

 lov of the Russian Navy. In 1848 and 1849 Baer wrote a series of 

 newspaper articles on Peter the Great's contribution to the ad- 

 vancement of geographical knowledge. These papers were trans- 

 lated into Russian and published in the Proceedings {Zapiski) of 

 the Geographical Society in 1849 and 1850. As soon as they ap- 



