BERING'S GREAT NORTHERN EXPEDITION. 93 



officers and thirty-one of the crew, so that when assistance 

 from Bering arrived, only eight men were alive. Miiller 

 and Gmelin say that the crew accused Lassenius of high 

 treason, and mutinied; but there is no documentary evi- 

 dence of this. The report seems to have arisen through 

 a confounding of the name of Lassenius with that of the 

 deputy constable Rosselius, who, on the 18th of Novem- 

 ber, 1735, was sent, under arrest, to Yakutsk. To fill 

 the vacancies caused by this terrible disease, Bering had to 

 send a whole new command — Lieut. Dmitri Laptjef, the 

 second mate Planting, and forty-three men — to Khariu- 

 lakh to continue the expedition. In addition to this, 

 two boats with provisions were sent to the mouth of the 

 Lena, and in 1737, before he himself departed for 

 Okhotsk, a shipload of provisions was sent to supply the 

 magazines on the Arctic coast. To these various tasks 

 Bering gave his personal attention. 



In 1736-38 this great enterprise passed through a dan- 

 gerous crisis. Several years had elapsed since the depart- 

 ure from St. Petersburg, three hundred thousand rubles 

 (over two hundred thousand dollars) had been expended 

 — an enormous sum at that time— and yet Bering could 

 not point to a single result. Lassenius was dead, his suc- 

 cessor, D. Laptjef, had been unfortunate, Pronchisheff 

 had, in two summers of cruising, not been able to double 

 the Taimyr peninsula, Ofzyn was struggling in vain in 

 the Gulf of Obi, while Bering and Spangberg had not 

 begun their Pacific expeditions. The former had not 

 even reached the coast. The government authorities at 

 St. Petersburg were in the highest degree dissatisfied with 

 this seeming dilatoriness. The Senate sent a most earnest 



