THE FIRST EXPEDITION ii 



Although at the time of the first attempt in the ship GabrieP 

 it would have been an easy matter, without further costs or loss 

 of time, by sailing on a northeast or east course, between the 

 parallels of 51° and 64° « north latitude, i. e. as far as the Kam- 

 chatkan shore extends from its extreme end at Cape Lopatka^ 

 to Chukchi Cape, to touch at the American islands by going 

 twenty or thirty miles^" or at the mainland itself by sailing fifty 

 to seventy miles,* nevertheless the officers in command at that 

 time were satisfied with a short exploration of Kamchatka from 

 Lopatka to the so-called Serdse Kamen,^^ which is not the same 

 by a considerable distance as the Chukchi Promontory, during 



7 The ship used by Bering on his voyage of 1728 (see Vol. i of the 

 present work, p. 18, footnote 34, and Fig. 6, opp. p. 20). (G) 



8 The MS has 61°. The correct latitude of Chukchi Cape is 64°, 

 however. 



9 The southern tip of Kamchatka (see Vol. i, PI. I). 



1" German miles, fifteen to a mean degree of latitude. One German 

 mile therefore equals 4 nautical miles, or 4.61 English statute miles. 



* As may be noticed from various passages, Steller imagined the Amer- 

 ican coast [to be] quite near towards the northeast and east, while at the 

 present time we are quite firmlj^ convinced of the opposite through the 

 discovery of the islands, their distances from each other and from 

 Kamchatka. — P. 



11 By this is meant the equivalent of East Cape, i. e. the cape near 

 which Bering turned back on his first expedition, having been informed 

 by the Chukchis that the land turned west from here (see also Vol. i, 

 pp. 18-19). According to the conception illustrated on the map by the 

 St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (a redraft of which, our Fig. 14, 

 accompanies the English translation by Jefferys, 1761, of the account of 

 this expedition by Miiller in Sammlung Russischer Geschichte, Vol. 3, 

 1758), a conception which Steller shared, to judge by the next words in 

 his journal (see, however, below, p. 19, line 10), this was not the north- 

 eastern extremity of Asia. This extremity was represented, as shown on 

 the aforesaid map, by a great protuberance extending northward almost 

 to the 75th parallel and designated Chukchi Promontory. These con- 

 ceptions are best illustrated by quoting from Jefferys' translation of 

 MuUer (p. 4; in German edition, pp. 11 7-1 19): 



"At last they arrived, on the 15th of August, in 67 deg. 18 min. North 

 latitude, at a promontory, behind which the coast extended towards the 

 West, as the former Tschuktschi had said. From this the captain drew a 

 pretty plausible conclusion, that now he had reached the extremity of 



