BERING'S FIRST EXPEDITION". 65 



astronomical determination, reached Europe, many be- 

 lieved that this land was identical with Yezo. But as 

 De Vries had left some determinations of latitude and 

 longitude which showed that the island must be very near 

 Japan, some went even so far as to suppose that it was 

 contiguous to Nipon ; indeed, Guillaume De Tlsle's essay 

 attempted to prove this. Thus three lands were made 

 one, while De Vries's Staaten Eiland and Kompagniland, 

 which could find no place in this series, were forced east- 

 ward into the Pacific as large tracts of land separated 

 from Kamchatka- Yezo and from each other by narrow 

 straits. But this is not all. The Portuguese cosmo- 

 grapher Texeira had in 1649, in these same regions, indi- 

 cated a coast projecting far to the east toward America, 

 seen by Juan de Gama on a voyage to New Spain from 

 the Philippine Islands. This Gamaland was now des- 

 cribed as a continuation of Kompagniland. In Homann's 

 Atlas, 1709, it is represented as a part of America, and 

 Guillaume De FIsle varied on the theme in a different 

 way.* 



Unfortunately these ideas held sway in the scientific 

 world when Bering, in 1730, returned. Furthermore, 

 scholars thought these ideas were confirmed by Swedish 

 prisoners of war who had returned from Siberia, espe- 

 cially by the famous Tabbert, or Strahlenberg, as he was 

 later called, whose various imaginary chart-outlines had 

 been adopted in Homann's Atlas, 1727, and in other West 

 European geographical works then in vogue, f 



Bering returned. His sober accounts and accurate 

 maps, in which there was nothing imaginary whatever, 



* See Maps II. and III. t Note 33. 



