THE VARIOUS EXPEDITION'S. 145 



59° 18' north latitude and 139° west longitude, but Cook 

 had not himself explored this bay; he had simply found 

 indications of a bay, and hence La Perouse and 

 Vancouver, whose explorations were much more in 

 detail, and who at this place could find no bay, were 

 obliged to seek elsewhere for it. La Perouse puts Bering 

 Bay 10' farther south, at the present Alsekh River, 

 northwest of Mt. Fairweather, the lagoon-shaped mouth 

 of which he calls Riviere de Bering, and Vancouver was 

 of the opinion that in La Perouse's Bay de Monti, 

 Dixon's Admiralty Bay, 59° 42' N. lat., he had found 

 Bering's place of landing. Vancouver's opinion has 

 hitherto held its own. The names Bering Bay, Admir- 

 alty Bay, or, as the Russians call it, Yakutat, are found 

 side by side; the latter, however, is beginning to displace 

 the former, and properly so, for Bering was never in or 

 near this bay.* 



While this Cook cartography fixed Bering's place of 

 landing too far east, the Russians committed the opposite 

 error. On the chart with which the Admiralty provided 

 Captain Billings on his great Pacific expedition, the 

 southern point of the Island of Montague, in Prince 

 William's Sound, (the Russian name of the island is 

 Chukli), is given as Bering's promontory St. Elias, and 

 the Admiralty gave him the right, as soon as the 

 expedition reached this point, to assume a higher military 

 rank, something which he actually did. But Admiral 

 Krusenstern, with his usual keenness, comes as near the 

 truth as it was possible without having Bering's own 

 chart and the ship's journal. He thinks that, according 



* Note 57. 



