Review of Berings First Hapedition, 1725-30. 147 
has been quoted by every one of the historians of the voyage from 
D’Anville to Lauridsen. I transcribe it from Brooke’s translation of 
1736, pp. 487-8. 
‘‘The provisions consisted of Carrots for want of Corn (=grain or 
wheat), the fat of Fish uncured served instead of Butter and salt fish 
supplied the place of all other meats.” 
Campbell in Harris’ Voyages, p. 1020, still further enlarges this state- 
ment and Lauridsen puts it 
‘Fish oil was his butter and dried fish his beef and pork. Salt he 
was obliged to get from the sea,” and ‘‘he distilled spirits from ‘sweet 
straw.’” 
This gives a totally false idea of the supplies provided for the expedi- 
tion. Bering received from Yakutsk over forty-two tons of flour, and 
large numbers, fifty at a time, of the small Siberian cattle were driven 
on the hoof to Okhotsk where their flesh was partly dried and partly 
salted. On his return he delivered surplus supplies to the proper 
officers in Kamchatka and at Okhotsk ever 30,000 lbs. of meal, flour 
and salt meat. There were at that time no carrots to be had in Kam- 
chatka as Bering himself testifies. Salted salmon then as now, formed 
a staple article of diet in Kamchatka and was without doubt included 
in his stores. The delicate fat obtained by boiling the bellies of the 
salmon, is annually prepared in Kamchatka and is regarded to this 
day as a great delicacy (cf. Voyage of the Marchesa, 2d edition, p. 135.) 
A store of it might without any hardship be furnished to the comman- 
der for use as butter. Salt he obtained as it is usually obtained by 
evaporating sea-water, and the absence of strong drink of European 
origin was supplied by a distillation of the stalks of the bear’s foot or 
‘¢sweet herb” of the Cossacks (Heraclewm dulce Kittlitz), long used for 
that purpose by the Russians in Siberia and from which, even in 
modern times, according to Seemann, the Kamchadales secured addi- 
tions to their scanty supply of syrup or sugar. 
The supplies then of the expedition, were not inferior to those in 
common use at sea at that period, and as far as health is concerned 
were certainly less likely to result in an invasion of scurvy than the 
use of salt beef and pork alone would have been. 
It must be remembered that the fare on naval vessels all over the 
world in those days, was rude and coarse to a degree now long unknown 
and that it was not until the voyages of Cook, nearly half a century 
later, that the antiscorbutic and varied regimen, now usually enforced 
by law in maritime nations, was even thought of. 
The force crowded together on the little Gabriel is enumerated by 
Lauridsen presumably from the account of Bergh. 
It consisted beside the commander, of Lieutenants Martin Spanberg 
and Alexie Chirikoff; Second Lieutenant Peter Chaplin, Doctor Nieman, 
a quartermaster, eight sailors, a worker in leather, a rope maker, five 
carpenters, a boatswain, two cossacks with a drummer and nine 
marines, six servants, stewards, etc., and two Kariak interpreters, a 
cabin boy and a pilot, in all forty-four persons. 
