116 National Geographic Magazine. 
have observed the first contact and the totality. At the time of 
the last eclipse he was at Lower Kamchatka post, and as, in the 
list of positions handed in with his Report in 1730, no longitude 
is entered for this locality, it would seem that choice is reduced 
to the first of the two mentioned ; which occurred when Bering 
was either at Bolsheretsk or on his way from that place to Lower 
Kamchatka, which he reached about a month later. Campbell’s 
table of positions is credited by him to the year 1728, but my 
Own opinion is that it was really derived (with various errors, 
interpolations, etc.) from Bering’s table of 1730. 
The ordinary method of getting the longitude of a place, and 
that upon which Bering originally depended, as his itinerary table 
shows, was by a continuous record of the distances and directions 
traveled from a point of known longitude. This record would 
afford the data from which the distance on a mean parallel, by 
means of a traverse table, could be computed. lLaborious, im- 
perfect, and slow as it was, it was the only sure reliance of the 
traveler in those days. Whether Bering observed an eclipse or 
not, it is certain that his original dependence was upon his 
itinerary, that his report was based upon that and that this part 
of his work was done as well as the nature of the method would 
permit. His silence about the eclipse’may be due to the fact that 
he depended not upon astronomical but upon pedometric observa- 
tions, to which the eclipse may have afforded some corrections. 
At any rate the pedometric determination of the distance between 
Tobolsk and Okhotsk or the peninsula of Kamchatka was in 
itself a tremendous undertaking. 
JI find by a rough calculation from Bering’s data that the longi- 
tude resulting from his itinerary from Tobolsk to. Okhotsk is 
77° 36' E. The distance in a straight line is about 2,390 miles, 
but by the route Bering traveled the distance is a little more than 
3,746 miles. The longitude in Bering’s List of Positions is 
76° 07', which differs from the pedometric measurement by 1° 297 
(or about 45 miles). On Bering’s map, Okhotsk is located in 
longitude 74° 30’ E. of Tobolsk, while the most modern observa- 
tions for Okhotsk put it in 142° 40’ E. of Greenwich or 75° 40! 
EK. of Tobolsk. So that Bering’s pedometric measurement was 
nearly 60 miles in excess ; his revised table (as corrected by the 
eclipse ?) 27 miles in excess ; and his map about 30 miles in error 
in the opposite direction. These discrepancies show the inexact- 
ness of the methods then in vogue and also that the pedometric 
