l6  SMITHSONIAN    MISCELLANEOUS    COLLECTIONS  VOL.    96 
in  a  Northwest  passage  from  Europe  to  the  Orient  had  led  to  a  num- 
ber of  voyages  of  exploration  in  the  sixteenth  century  which  had  made 
known  at  least  the  main  outlines  of  the  geography  of  the  northern 
Atlantic  and  even  of  parts  of  the  Arctic,  it  was  not  until  the  eighteenth 
century  that  reliable  information  was  available  on  the  vast  region  of 
the  Pacific  stretching  northward  from  Japan.  The  accounts  of  the 
Jesuit  missionaries  in  China  and  Japan  and  of  the  Dutch  and  Spanish 
navigators  of  the  seventeenth  century  were  so  vague  and  conflicting 
that  the  contemporary  maps  of  this  region  were  hopelessly  inaccurate. 
The  island  of  Yezo,  in  the  northern  part  of  the  Japanese  archipelago, 
had  assumed  almost  continental  proportions,  and  this  and  other  imagi- 
nary lands  were  thought  to  lie  between  or  to  connect  the  continents 
of  Asia  and  America. 
While  the  cartographers  were  busying  themselves  with  these  imagi- 
nary problems,  Russian  traders  and  adventurers  were  pushing  east- 
ward across  Siberia,  and  it  was  these  overland  explorations  that 
opened  the  way  for  the  later  voyages  that  were  eventually  to  settle 
the  question  of  the  geographical  relationship  between  Asia  and 
America.  By  1632  the  Cossacks  had  penetrated  far  into  Siberia  and 
established  the  fortified  town  of  Yakutz  on  the  upper  Lena  River, 
from  which  point  military  expeditions  were  sent  out  to  collect  tribute 
from  the  native  peoples.  In  the  course  of  a  few  years  the  Arctic 
coast  was  reached  and  the  rivers  Yana,  Indigirka,  and  Kolyma,  which 
flowed  into  the  Frozen  Sea,  were  discovered  to  the  eastward. 
In  1648  seven  small  trading  vessels  set  out  from  the  mouth  of  the 
Kolyma,  and  one  of  these,  in  command  of  the  Cossack  Simeon 
Deshnev,  succeeded  in  rounding  East  Cape,  passed  through  Bering 
Strait,  and  continuing  southward  finally  reached  the  Anadyr  River, 
where  in  the  following  year  the  fortress  of  Anadyrsk  was  established. 
News  of  this  remarkable  voyage  did  not  reach  the  Russian  court,  and 
it  might  have  remained  entirely  unknown  had  not  the  original  manu- 
script records  been  discovered  in  the  Archives  at  Yakutz  by  the  his- 
torian Gerhard  Friedrich  Miiller  in  1736,  almost  a  hundred  years 
later. 
Following  the  exploits  of  Deshnev  and  his  companions,  the  Russians 
continued  their  explorations  in  eastern  Siberia.  Before  the  close  of 
the  seventeenth  century  Kamchatka  had  been  discovered,  and  by  1715 
its  subjugation  had  been  accomplished.  As  news  of  the  Russian  dis- 
coveries reached  Europe,  the  Emperor  Peter  the  Great  became  per- 
sonally interested  and  in  1718  dispatched  two  of  his  naval  officers  to 
the  Pacific,  with  instructions  to  sail  north  and  east  of  Kamchatka 
to  determine  whether  or  not  Asia  and  America  were  united.    This 
