164 National Geographic Magazine. 
friendly as Dr. Campbell assuming with great confidence that 
Bering’s conclusions as to the separation of the two continents 
were erroneous. It was not until the voyages of Captain Cook 
and his associates were given to the world in 1784 that the matter 
was settled beyond controversy. 
Even in regard to the details of his voyage it was only through 
Bergh’s publication of Chaplin’s logbook of the voyage in 1823, 
that the public were informed as to what Bering did, and it was 
only in 1847 that the unmutilated, but still ambiguous Report of 
1730 was accessible even in Russian typography. 
We find that all the authorities who published in the last cen- 
tury copies of Bering’s map and accounts of his expedition 
arrived at what Lauridsen calls an “interesting misunderstanding.” 
This misunderstanding was that he had sailed along the Chuk- 
chi coast, as above suggested, and that his farthest point was in 
latitude 67° 18’ on the coast of northeastern Siberia. 
How was it possible that men of such exceptional intelligence 
as Du Halde and D’Anville and Miiller, and Hazius, and Euler 
and Campbell were all so deceived ? 
The facts are as follows : 
(1) The verbatim Report of the voyage, the eben of the 
expedition, Bering’s chart in its entirety, were inaccessible to the 
public for many years; the chart has never been fully engraved 
for publication. 
(2) The fragments of the Report which were circulated in 
print were ambiguous in their language or erroneously modified ; 
while the published reductions of the chart which got into print 
were misleading, or even erroneous. 
(3) Two conflicting versions of the manuscript chart were 
circulated and appear to have been officially sent out. That 
which appears to be the later of the two is in some details quite 
erroneous and at variance with Bering’s report as printed and 
with the facts derived from Chaplin’s logbook, these two consti- 
tuting the only authentic original information which has yet 
reached the public in printed form. But these two sources of 
correct data about the expedition were not printed until long 
after the charts had been widely circulated, while the extracts 
from the Report which appeared in print, even under so friendly 
an editor as Dr. Campbell were so modified as to support rather 
than expose the original error. How this arose there may be 
something in the Russian archives to explain, or, if not, the case 
